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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those articles where you really wish the author had a better grasp of technology. From what I could decipher the really story here isn't ending of Cookie Tracking but supplementing/replacing it with unique identifiers for users. Which, if you're logged into Google's system at the moment, I'm pretty sure is already the case. Google knows who you are throughout all of its systems. What it doesn't allow is advertisers to know who you are. If they're considering allowing advertisers access to unique data about each user, that would be a really big story.

Facebook requires you to be logged in to do anything, so there's nothing new here.

Microsoft assigning unique IDs to its Surface devices doesn't really matter because nobody uses them.

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What I understood from the badly-written article is this: the big platform companies will start blocking third-party cookies (where applicable, say Chrome) and replacing it with their own centralized, incompatible, proprietary, wannabe-monopolistic version of third-party cookies.

So instead of having pretty much anyone on the Internet tracking you by default you will have pretty much anyone on the Internet tracking you through Google - except for people Google doesn't like. And in the Apple world Apple will be the gatekeeper and so on.

I don't see how this is an improvement.

And thank god for Firefox for keeping these people in check.

Letting the browser generate the unique ID (such as a guid) may actually have benefits for users. As long as the identifiers are kept secret you would have the benefit of a login without the site needing to store any personal information. This gives much more positive control to users than an opaque cookie. It is also easier to make legislation around as you could mandate that the user supplied unique ID is the only information (along with basic browser details) that can be stored.

And then remove the existence of cookies altogether, I infer. Since only a unique identifier is necessary, with all other session data and preferences being stored on the server.

I notice in a comment further up that Apple has two separate IDs. One for advertising and one for tracking users of a vendor's applications. Should this browser ID system have two separate IDs, one for securely identifying a user and another for advertising? The secure ID would have to be unique per website, otherwise phishing schemes just became ridiculously easy.

I suppose you could implement a browser plugin that maintains separate cookies for separate combinations of sites. So that buzzfeed + facebook would be put in one bucket, and cnn + facebook in another bucket. You could then ask the users permission to use real cookies.

Yup.

This may be part of the lack of technical background in the article, but how do Facebook widgets on people's sites track whether you are logged in to Facebook if not via cookies? The mechanisms I know, user agent and IP address, don't seem reliable enough to replace a session cookie.

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