- Tracking of users around the internet has become crucial to the inner workings of many advertising networks. By using cookies, small text files placed on a computer which were originally created to let sites mark who was logged in, advertisers can build a detailed picture of the browsing history of members of the public, and use that to more accurately profile and target adverts to the right individuals.
Many of these cookies, known as “third-party” cookies because they aren’t controlled by the site that loads them, can be blocked by browsers already. But advertisers also use “first-party” cookies, loaded by a site the user does visit but updated as they move around the net. Blocking those breaks many other aspects of the internet that users expect to work, such as the ability to log into sites using Facebook or Twitter passwords.
To tackle this, the new Safari feature uses a “machine learning model”, Apple says, to identify which first-party cookies are actually desired by users, and which are placed by advertisers. If the latter, the cookie gets blocked from third-party use after a day, and purged completely from the device after a month, drastically limiting the ability of advertisers to keep track of where on the web Safari users visit.
Pi-hole has been a godsend. I use it at home and at work. Fuck ads. Seriously, there is a history of a lack of security and "give-a-shit-itis" about privacy in the whole of the ad industry. If you have $70, get a raspberry pi, load it up, install pi-hole and fuck 'em at the network level. We do this on our public patient-facing wifi as well.
The lack of security is actually crazy. Go to a random website, look up what U-Block origin is blocking, and Google some of the add networks that show up. It's crazy how many of them are on sites that help people tackle malware issues. Shoot. That virus that got my Android phone? Five bucks says it got on there from some kind of ad network exploit because ironically, the only third party app I ever installed on it was MalWare Bytes.
Hmmm... With all the data storage available nowadays, and with the ability to identify a person using browser information, operating system, etc, gleaned from a person browsing, I wonder if someone isn't simply just building (or building upon) a central storage/database which advertisers and interested parties can access to determine which customer may be visiting their site?