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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Before 3rd party cookies, companies would proxy advertising traffic through the primary domain.

It was annoying to setup, and technically complicated, but it worked.

If 3rd party cookies had never been enabled, that's what we would be doing today, and you would never even know your traffic was being sent to a 3rd party.

There's a reason they enabled 3rd party cookies: Because blocking them did not help at all.

Today such proxying would be even easier. Don't promote banning 3rd party cookies, you'll just make privacy even worse.

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Proxying does not allow a 3rd party to track beyond the customer domain boundary. So yes, ads will be served, like tv ads, but they will not be a based on your behavior at other site(s)

> Proxying does not allow a 3rd party to track beyond the customer domain boundary.

I'm fairly sure one of us misunderstand.

I'm usure if I misread you post or if you think there is a technical limitation to prevent a tracking company from reading cookies from proxied data?

If so, do you care to explain?

I would think the idea is that cookies set on a.com cannot be read by b.com. Even if they both proxy cookies from the same advertising network.

I see. I was talking about the fact that the cookies are visible to the ad/tracking company.

In my opinion (and I think this is common) ad/tracking companies are third parties and when a company proxy data to one of them it is then by definition residing with a third party ev3n if they don't share it with their other customers.

An advertising company knows I travelled to wikivoyage and spent lots of time reading about Thailand.

They then know that I (same cookie) visited cnn and read about Ebola

They then know I visited a cycle magazine and read about a new bike.

With proxying they wouldn’t be able to link those three visits together (with cookie data)

When I visit a fourth site, it’s a brand new visit - there is no way for the advertising. Company to know I’m the same version who visited the previous sites.

And I think GP's idea is that if companies can't send over your identifying data from client side to advertising companies then they are more than happy to send it over from server side.

Proxying increases the cost and effort of tracking. It's more involved than simply adding a bit of JS to a page. Things like the Facebook 'like' button is a tracker that people adding it to their page won't even realise was a tracker and thus would be less likely to put in the effort to proxy that to Facebook.

For sites that make their money from advertising adding proxying would probably be a requirement and be worth the effort, but for most other sites that are trackers by accident it wouldn't be.

Restricting third party cookies won't prevent all tracking but it will increase the cost and reduce the number of sites doing tracking without knowing it.

I doubt it is the same when you consider some sites have more then 100 "partners". GDPR is not targeted at cookies or at any tech, it applies even if you use pen and paper so proxying will still be illegal.

.. but from a GDPR perspective and accountability perspective, it makes it much clearer what is happening.

> If 3rd party cookies had never been enabled, that's what we would be doing today, and you would never even know your traffic was being sent to a 3rd party.

Fortunately the GDPR also makes this illegal without consent, it legislates the conditions necessary to collect data and the permission you need to share it with third parties. It's not in any way specific to cookies.

And long before cookies the session id was stored in the query string.

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