Mozilla anticookie tool plans crumbling
Mozilla's plans to automatically block certain cookies in its Firefox browser earned praise from privacy advocates and disdain from the ad industry when it was announced earlier this year.
The Mountain View open source software foundation revealed eight months ago it was testing a tool that would restrict, by default, tracking files from companies that users didn't interact with.
Why should the average consumer care about any of this?
Because blocking these kinds of tracking files is the difference between hundreds of companies you've never heard of invisibly monitoring your online activity or not.
[...] negotiations continue on crafting rules for abiding by do-not-track requests, a setting in major browsers that could offer users a simple way of stating privacy preferences.
Jonathan Mayer, the independent researcher who wrote the cookie-blocking patch, said his dual goals were to create a tool that would empower consumers and nudge forth the do-not-track talks, which he participated in until this summer.
Brendan Eich, the chief technology officer of Mozilla, said in a blog post that the organization had received feedback from concerned site owners and wanted to evaluate the patch further.
The following month, Eich said Mozilla was "committing to work" with Aleecia McDonald at the Center for Internet and Society on the Cookie Clearinghouse project, which plans to create evolving block-and-allow lists to manage these kind of edge cases.
Once that document is complete, the process is likely to take another three to five months as they seek public comment, make necessary revisions and produce the first versions of the lists themselves, said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology and an advisory board member for the Cookie Clearinghouse.
Mozilla's Anderson insists the organization never promised to do anything more than evaluate the blocking feature and that it turned to the Cookie Clearinghouse because Mayer's patch turned out to be "a blunt force instrument."