Cookies are text files containing tiny pieces of information by which the computer can be detected. While intended to enhance the viewing experience on the website, it could also be used, despite any permission, to track online activities. Google now plans to destroy third-party cookies as part of its Sandbox privacy project on its Chrome web browser, an effort that aims to allow personal ads while restricting data detection.
Mozilla uses the 'cookie jar' example to explain the current blocker, whereby each third-party that drops a cookie in the browser has all the collected knowledge limited to its own cookie jar. This stops trackers from monitoring the activities from site to site. In its battle to protect the privacy of people while accessing the internet, Mozilla's Total Cookie Protection is the most recent maneuver. Total cookie protection adds up to current Firefox attempts to prevent websites and online publicity providers from making a profile of one’s web history through using internet cookies as well as other computer scripts.
“Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to that website, such that it is not allowed to be shared with any other website,” Mozilla wrote in a blog post.
The company wants to silo off each because the cookie data is exchanged on the pages. Online advertisers can then understand what websites users want to access so that they can try and send relevant ads.
“In combining Total Cookie Protection with last month’s super cookie protections, Firefox is now armed with very strong, comprehensive protection against cookie tracking,” the company said.
The Total Cookie Protection also provides an exception for non-tracking cookie-related scripts such as third-party login or password plugins.
The potential solution should therefore help avoid the breakdown of a website. Mozilla has taken a page in the "first party isolation" of Tor browser to develop total cookie protection, which also requires cookies to be segregated into the website domain.