Mozilla Delays Firefox Third Party Cookie-blocking Plan for A Few Months

Mozilla, has yet again, delayed its plan for Firefox’s controversial third-party cookie-blocking policy, this time for several more months.

It was announced yesterday by an open source developer that they were working on a new proposal, called Cookie Clearinghouse (CCH), launched by Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society.

Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO wrote on his personal blog that the company is now committed to start working to develop the CCH in order for Firefox users to start utilizing its list to control exemptions to a visited-based third-party cookie block.

Spearheading the CCH project is Alexia McDonald, the director for Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, and formerly worked as a part-time privacy researcher for Mozilla, needs to work on a directory of sites to be considered for blocking by browsers, and another that would incorporate block exceptions.

The said index would be similar to the blacklist and whitelist that are used for different purposes, such as preventing browser users from going to sites that are potentially malicious. The centralized and continuously updated directory is essential to resolve the false positive and false negative results that have overwhelmed Firefox’s third party cookie-blocker, said Eich.

Online advertisers use cookies to trace users’ online activities, and then later send targeted ads. Firefox allowed the cookies from the user’s actual visit to the domain – called the first-party site – but should have blocked cookies generated by a third-party domain, unless the user has visited the site origin of the cookie.

A common scenario for a first-party cookie is those ads placed in a user’s browsers such as Amazon.com, to classify the customer’s visits, and allowing them to skip the log in page. Cookies from a third-party site are most of the time placed on ads on first-party website in order for advertisers and online networks to track the users past movements.

The said feature was supposed to debut early this year in the Firefox 22, which is scheduled to launch on June 25. Firefox 23 will launch on August 6 was also said to include the feature, however, Mozilla postponed the implementation last month, on grounds that it needed to analyze data of the effects of blocking some of the third-party cookies.