Mozilla, publisher of Firefox, has always made the protection of user data one of its guidelines. It thus remains faithful to its policy with the latest update of its browser which completely reviews the management of cookies. Since June 14, users now have access to the “total protection against cookies” feature which makes advertising targeting less intrusive.
Sites can only draw from their own cookie box
Cookies are the traces left by the user of a browser, making it possible to constitute his profile. This is how targeted advertising is done on websites. While browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge store cookies collected from different websites in a common space, Firefox opts for a different method.
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The “total protection against cookies” (TCP for Total Cookie Protection) function is now accessible in the Privacy and security tab of the Firefox settings. Once the feature is activated, cookies will no longer be stored in the same way.
Cookies will continue to be collected on the sites authorized by the Internet user, but will be stored in a separate space dedicated to each website. Via his official blog, Mozilla uses a cake box analogy to explain the principle. Usually cookies are all stored in one jar, which all sites can draw from. With the total protection activated, they will only be able to use themselves in the pot which is assigned to them and which therefore contains fewer cookies. This makes tracking Internet users less intrusive.
Image: Mozilla/Firefox.
Firefox remains a very little used browser compared to Chrome
” This approach strikes a balance between eliminating the worst privacy properties of third-party cookies – in particular the ability to track you – and allowing these cookies to perform their less intrusive functions. », Explains the American company.
A site can therefore no longer use cookies from another, but still uses its internal cookies to keep the display of a page offline, for example. Firefox also offers options to manage the cookies used by each site to see how much space they take up on the hard drive. They can then be selected and deleted very easily.
According to the website Statcounter, Google Chrome still dominates the browser industry with 64.95% of global users. Firefox is miniscule in size by comparison, with only 3.26% of internet users using this browser. Its impact on data protection is therefore minimal.
When Google announces that it wants to end the existence of third-party cookies by 2023, the entire internet is potentially affected. With the disappearance of cookies, websites will be forced to rethink their business models, targeted advertising represents a large part of their income. As an alternative, Google offers Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). These are semi-anonymized user groups that will serve as new advertising targets.