It seems there were/are a couple of workarounds for setting third party cookies in Safari.<p>One was to send a POST request in a hidden iframe using javascript. This was supposedly what Google used to bypass Safari's blocking of third party cookies[1].<p>Another is (was?) to redirect to the third party domain, and then back again[2]. This would supposedly work since the restriction on third party cookies doesn't apply to already visited domains.<p>1: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9930671/safari-3rd-party-cookie-iframe-trick-no-longer-working" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9930671/safari-3rd-party...</a><p>2: <a href="http://www.mendoweb.be/blog/internet-explorer-safari-third-party-cookie-problem/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mendoweb.be/blog/internet-explorer-safari-third-p...</a>
<i>Google told the BBC: "This is not new - we have defended similar cases before. We don't believe it has any merit and we will contest it."</i><p><i>Google agreed to pay a record $22.5m (£16.8m) in a case brought by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the same issue in 2012.</i><p>It will be interesting how this one ends, here's hoping for a pro consumer verdict.
It's going to become increasingly expensive and politically complex to operate an Internet company at Internet scale. That process of country to country division (legally/politically), will continue to accelerate.<p>Although they're getting the first punches to the face because they're easy and obvious targets, companies like Google or Facebook, will trivially withstand it over time. They can afford whatever compliance cost and complexity is involved. It's everyone else that is going to suffer, including all start-ups attempting to offer an Internet-wide service (something that not so long ago could be mostly taken for granted). The effect will be to lock-in the position of the existing giants and protect them from new companies that might challenge their global dominance.<p>If I want to offer an Internet-wide service in the near future, I'll need to comply with dozens of different Internet-related legal/political frameworks to spread into dozens of nations. It'll be realistically impossible to accomplish for smaller entities, so start-ups will be stuck even more than they already are in struggling to reach beyond their local audiences. This will particularly harm start-ups in smaller countries in Latin America, Africa and Europe. Start-ups in the US and China will gain a further advantage (an advantage which they've already utilized to produce most of the Internet giants to this point), because they get to start out with massive home markets with heavily unified rules and then push to the rest of the world from their large base.<p>This process destroys the Internet as it has been known the last two decades and it appears nothing is likely to stop it from getting dramatically worse in the next 10-15 years.
On the surface this new incident says Google doesn't care about privacy. Most agree with this assessment.<p>But taken a step further it seems fair to ask:<p>- Has Google lost its edge? Why has nefarious replaced innovation?<p>- What else are they doing that we don't yet know about?<p>- Is it time for Google to update its biz model so it isn't so dependent on being so driven (to desperation)?<p>- Finally, is it time for the market to reconsider Google's role in defining our collective future?<p>On a personal note, if I can be fairly certain Apple isn't going to "pimp my data" I would give an iphone a serious consideration.
Is this why I can’t sign out of Google on my phone? I never sign into Google and never sign into their apps. After I began using a Google Home I began noticing Google maps is automatically signing me in.
Article just says they used cookies for tracking. Does anyone have a better article, indicating why this work a workaround, and they it affected iPhones in particular?
The fact that it was for ads and not for a more legit app, makes me bias against them. Normally, it wouldn't matter at all. There's an app, it doesn't work in safari for some reason, and you figure out a workaround.
So Google deployed malware against... tens of millions of people?... in order to steal confidential data for profit, by bypassing security mechanisms on those devices as they interacted with Google servers, exceeding authorized access, and using installed code to track the activities of people against their efforts to raise technical barriers?<p>That sounds like an international criminal act on a scale most malware authors would wet themselves over.<p>It's also not surprising that the public is getting fed up with the wanton criminality that seems to be embodied by modern capitalism.
Yeah uh, it's pretty obvious this guy doesn't really care about the privacy thing, but cares about getting a lot of money from Google. How many people does he even represent that want to be compensated?