The Firefox developers at Mozilla are no longer going to tolerate the miscreants in the Adtech business. On their blog, they lay out their plans for dealing with tracking. Among other things, they will be stripping cookies from tracking sites and not allowing them the use of local storage. Take a look at the post for what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. The Safari browser is also addressing the problem in similar but slightly different ways.
I wish the other browser vendors would also get serious about tracking. What I’d really like to see is fine grained control over cookies. As it stands, I have to manually delete cookies several times a day. Why can’t I specify something like, “Except for sites A, B, and C, delete all cookies at the end of each session or when I push a button.” That would enable innocuous sites like weather or TV Guide to store their configuration between sessions while still getting rid of the riffraff.
Safari makes it particularly difficult to deal with cookies because they store them in a database. When they’re just text files, it’s easy to write shell scripts to get that fine grained control. Still, Firefox’s initiative is welcome and I hope that they and the other vendors will give us still more control over our browsers. There’s no reason that the browser vendors should be enabling the reprehensible behavior of Adtech.