"Facebook's new ad service, launched earlier this month, gets around the traditional third-party advertising cookies by doing the tracking on its own. When a person visits a website selling shoes on a work PC, a piece of Facebook code placed on that site—Facebook's own cookie—recognizes that the person has logged into Facebook using that browser before. The shoe seller can then send the person an ad for the shoe on Facebook's mobile app—even if that person never registered with the shoe seller."<p>This highlights the dangers of the seemingly harmless social widgets. Anyone who doesn't already, I highly recommend using a plugin such as ghostery[1] to block them.<p>[1]<a href="https://www.ghostery.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ghostery.com/</a>
Wait, what?<p><i>"On Wednesday, Microsoft quietly announced in a blog post that the company will give marketers the ability to track and advertise to people who use apps on its Windows 8 and 8.1 operating system on tablets and PCs. The company will do this by assigning each user a number—a unique identifier—that monitors them across all of their apps. (The system doesn't block cookies in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.) Industry players think Microsoft-powered smartphones and Xbox game consoles will be a natural extension of the system, but Microsoft kept mum on the question."</i>
This is one of those articles where you really wish the author had a better grasp of technology. From what I could decipher the really story here isn't ending of Cookie Tracking but supplementing/replacing it with unique identifiers for users. Which, if you're logged into Google's system at the moment, I'm pretty sure is already the case. Google knows who you are throughout all of its systems. What it doesn't allow is advertisers to know who you are. If they're considering allowing advertisers access to unique data about each user, that would be a really big story.<p>Facebook requires you to be logged in to do anything, so there's nothing new here.<p>Microsoft assigning unique IDs to its Surface devices doesn't really matter because nobody uses them.
So, this isn't so much about the "end" of using cookies to track users as it is about the "rise" of enhanced methods enabled by the fact we are constantly logged in to services like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.<p>The thing is, even Google services (Search, Analytics, etc) and Facebook (the Like Button, etc) use cookies to track users. It's still fundamentally the same thing. The difference is that by logging in to the same service (Google, Facebook, etc) on difference devices and browsers, they can "link" the cookie data together for a more complete picture of your online activity.<p>Adding to this cross-cookie data, these services can include data from their actual services (Google Search, the Facebook Social Graph, etc), and are starting to include data about the Apps you use (in their respective ecosystems). It's a nice bundle of data they can sell to advertisers (indirectly, via ad targeting).<p>The scarier question is: will the tracking be enabled at the client/device level? Will your Google or Microsoft web browser (or OS) directly collect and track information about your browsing? Or will it still be limited to "web tracking" (with enhanced ability to connect cookie data across multiple devices)?
It's worth noting that the EU "Cookie Law" doesn't actually explicitly refer to cookies.<p>Its wording is broad enough to include alternative approaches of individually tracking users.
There is no mention of Yahoo in the article at all. The article's title is "Web Giants Threaten End to Cookie Tracking". HN's title is misleading.
Will they use EME/DRM to make them undeleteable, too?<p><a href="http://blog.notevencode.com/posts/html5-eme-is-not-a-drm-standard/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.notevencode.com/posts/html5-eme-is-not-a-drm-sta...</a>
"Cookies let advertisers reach digital audiences, but the trail stops at smartphones and tablets, because cookie technology doesn't work well on them."<p>Is there something here I'm missing? I spend more time browsing the web on my Android phone than my PC and I've never ran into any issues with "cookie-driven" features.
The story seems to be that these companies want to do ad attribution across devices. Example: I click on an Adword on my phone, and come to your site. I then come back later on my desktop computer and buy something. Google would like you to consider this when you evaluate the ROI of that ad campaign. The author of the story sounds completely clueless.
Google is bluffing... They never would end online cooking tracking because that is how they effectively target ads.<p>If people stop getting their money's worth with advertising on Google then Google will lose money.
I think they are talking about 3rd party cookies only. Cookies aren't going away, otherwise most of the web will break.<p>And they are already severely limiting 3rd party cookies. Even Mozilla's in on the action: <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240218/Mozilla_again_postpones_Firefox_third_party_cookie_blocking_this_time_for_months" rel="nofollow">http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240218/Mozilla_again...</a>
Interestingly it sounds like MS is going the opposite way to Apple which has been taking steps to stop apps (and probably ads too) from tracking the device (although you can track across different apps from the same developer).
I assume they will use some kind of browser fingerprinting.<p><a href="https://panopticlick.eff.org/" rel="nofollow">https://panopticlick.eff.org/</a>