Browsing without Third-Party Cookies: What Do You See?

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10775v1
• Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2024 17:47:43 GMT
• Title: Browsing without Third-Party Cookies: What Do You See?
• Authors: Maxwell Lin, Shihan Lin, Helen Wu, Karen Wang, Xiaowei Yang,
• Abstract summary: Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. To understand the effects of such third-party cookieless browsing, we crawled and measured the top 10,000 Tranco websites. We develop a framework to remove third-party cookies and analyze the differences between the appearance of web pages with and without these cookies.
• Score: 5.181502547611254
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party cookieless browsing, we crawled and measured the top 10,000 Tranco websites. We developed a framework to remove third-party cookies and analyze the differences between the appearance of web pages with and without these cookies. We find that disabling third-party cookies has no substantial effect on website appearance including layouts, text, and images. This validates the industry-wide shift towards cookieless browsing as a way to protect user privacy without compromising on the user experience.

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