Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Another Round in the Internet Advertising Battle

A group of advertisers have requested Apple to rethink/withdraw the release of Safari 11 in MacOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and iOS 11 because it contains an Intelligent Tracking Provision that blocks cross site tracking. You can read Apple's response in this MacRumors article.

If this were a MacOS only feature the battle would be pretty one sided but since it also appears in iOS, the odds would seem to favor Apple. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.

Are cookies single-purpose, or, for instance, could cross-site tracking cookies be tailored to also be necessary for proper rendering of web pages or complete functionality of websites?

The right to privacy is under assault from every direction. I would never say that it would be impossible to develop a cookie that would prevent the function of a given web site if that cookie could was prevented from sending tracking data to one or more third party sites. As I have said before in the matter of security, "What the human mind can devise, another human mind can find a way around". This is just another battle in what is shaping up to be a generations long war between advertisers and those concerned about privacy.

The era of no cost internet content may be passing.

Another challenge for the greatest minds on the planet!

I have encountered a number of web sites that do not function correctly, if at all, when I have ad blocker extensions enabled. Curiously enough some fo these sites are shopping carts that fail when the SUBMIT button is clicked. If I remember to turn off the ad-blocker extension it often fixes the problem. Since Safari 11 has provisions for enabling Content blockers on a site by site basis perhaps over time I can "fix" these problem sites at the expense of giving up some privacy. It will be interesting to see if those sites will work with "Prevent cross-site tracking" turned on. Time will tell.

SERMON: Financial support for content sites is a significant issue that is not going to go away. It is unrealistic to believe they can continue to exist without some form of support whether it is from donations, subscriptions, memberships, or advertising. So in order to keep internet content sources freely available and unbiased by advertiser or other financial pressures, I make it a point to financially contribute or subscribe to those sources I find useful such as Wikipedia, PBS, Washington Post, etc.. IMHO this may be one of the best weapon for combating overly intrusive advertising and internet tracking. Given the cost of all the privacy services I am already paying for; DNS filtering, ad blocking VPNs, ad-blocking extensions, cookie management software, VPN, etc, contributing to these content sources becomes an investment and not a cost.