Apocalypse now: Ad biz cries foul over Apple's great AI cookie purge

>It sounds reasonable although 30 days is quite a short period

Suggest default and have a tool that allows for notification when cookies associated with a website are about to expire giving the user the chance to okay deletion in a similar way ad blockers and content filters work.

Remembering details

Amazon and other ecommerce sites spring to mind as ones that I may not use for a few months but might want it to remember my details next time I do

What about NOT letting your browser store them (where some malware can get at them) and using one of the many tools such as 1Password etc to manage them? Then they are all held in an encrypted store.

Then you can clear your browser history every day or when you close your browser. Isn't that a better solution?

Then at least Amazon can't ID you when you want to do a bit of window shopping. That means less of the 'based upon your browsing history, we think you would like' emails.

The less these people know about you the better IMHO.

"Amazon and other ecommerce sites spring to mind as ones that I may not use for a few months but might want it to remember my details next time I do"

What details?

If you log in, it will pull all the stuff on the server

If you are on about passwords, just save the password.

What it won't allow is you browsing Amazon then for the next six months, ad's based on that search appearing in every website you visit, and the associate back tracking i.e. Amazon know what sites you visited and saw those ad's.

Amazon, for one, will remember who you are as soon as you log in, whether or not you have a single cookie saved. I know this for certain as I just logged in using a brand-new, just installed less than a half hour ago, browser on a brand-new, set up earlier today, account, on brand-new, delivered and set up in Mint this morning, hardware. No cookies or other bumf in sight, at least not until I went to Amazon and signed in. I'd say that any ecommerce site which can't keep track of your account without using cookies on your system is one you really shouldn't be using. What the cookies do is to keep track of _you_; if I kill tracking cookies and the like, then Amazon has no clue about what I do when I'm _not_ on their site. They can and will see everything that I do on their site, but it's THEIR SITE. If I log into another site using the same login, and if that site has an agreement with Amazon, then Amazon can see what I did there, too, and the other site can see what I did on Amazon. So I use different logins. Without tracking cookies et al Amazon would have to put effort into tracking me, where 'effort' is spelled 'money', and the rate of return for that is too small for them to bother. (Google would be a whole different matter, but there are ways to deal with them, too.)

I'd rather they expired after a few hours or a day at most. 30 days is too long.

mark I - the Safari thing is about third party cookies, not the cookies Amazon sets itself when you visit the site (although Amazon also uses browser data). This move won't affect your logged-in status at Amazon. What it does affect is Amazon's ability to track your movements around the web using third-party cookies set when you visit *other* sites.

Re: it is sad

Because ad blocking is optional on browsers and most people take the default. Besides, with Chrome having the majority market share these days, if ad blocking really was to become popular Google would undoubtedly sabotage or disable ad blocking capability. They don't make money off people who block ads, they only tolerate it on Chrome today because it is a minority of users.

"Targeted advertising should be banned and the advertising industry can go to hell"

Erm ever heard of iAd, Apple used to brag to advertisers that only knew what apps users had, how they used them, what music they listen to, their ages, gender, and so on.

They have now given up on iAd but they still sniff your data to sell App Store advertising.

Whilst I applaud Apple for tackling the cookie issue, they are being hypocritical. You can only take the higher moral ground once you stop spying on your own customers, refusing to let other people make money out of your cash cows is far from being virtuous.

And yes, Google and MS are just as bad.

Re: While I dislike Apple

I would actually like to have websites in one browser tab _not_ know about the websites in the other browser tabs. At all.

So you want private browsing, which all browsers already support? AFAIK using private browsing mode on iOS every "tab" is separate (tab in quotes because the IOS GUI displays a "pile" of windows rather than tabs on a single window) Do some browsers only protect different windows from each other, and not tabs from each other?

You'll never have perfect anonymity though. You could browse two different sites, one using Chrome and one using Firefox, and have them "know" about each other if they hit the same adservers. OK maybe not know, but guess with a high degree of likelihood, based on your IP address. Even if you have a dynamic IP, it doesn't reset that often, so it would be a reasonable guess it is the same person/household browsing to both sites even if different browsers were used or one came from a Windows PC and the other came from an iPhone.

Re: While I dislike Apple

"students have no sex"

You must've had the most boring university experience ever.

Re: How many ads is too many?

Yikes! I clicked on my uBlock Origin and it said it had blocked 735,000 ads since install....I had recently reinstalled everything so that's only six months' worth!!!