Apple just updated its Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature to block third party website trackers and crawlers. Chrome also announced recently that they will block third party cookies in a couple of years and Mozilla has also done it. One of the rare instances of late, where market induced competition is leading to a more private and trustworthy environment for users. What do you guys think?
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Look up Brave browser too.
Cookies are a small part of browser tracking, which is a small part of overall online tracking, which is a small part of an much larger, and much broader problem with individual privacy.
This appears to be a step in the right direction, until you realize that most browser vendors are also some of the worst offenders when it comes to tracking. Part of the reason being these vendors are also platform owners. On most connected devices & OS platforms, tracking happens irrespective of whether you are browsing or not. Browser blocking solves only a small part of the problem.
Tracking is good for business because it’s easy (for vendors to collect & provide services against), hard (for researchers) to quantify, and difficult (for the public) to understand the long-term side-effects. Unless there is a penalty/larger public movement, vendors are going to lag behind on tackling this issue substantively.
This is one of the key problems we are trying to solve at Banbreach 
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There is no standardized way to collect feedback and do a/b testing. If platforms enable a standardized way to track user behavior and collect feedback for various purposes anonymously, it would greatly reduce the overall burden on everyone. The current market is dominated by a few analytics solutions particularly google analytics. The first reason is the cost and second how hard it is to implement good analytics. Google analytics does both right and that’s why it is no surprise it’s widely used.
I would stay away from brave given their past behavior of affiliate spam and I dislike the model they operate on. I like the direction where web monetization is going comparatively. Check out coil.
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Very good points.
To clarify, I wanted to point out Brave – and not endorse the product per se – as they are trying something different. One could say that they have simply appropriated Adblock Plus’ model at the browser level.