Ad group: New Firefox cookie plan will boost spam
Found on CNet News on Tuesday, 12 March 2013
The trade group, whose senior vice president tweeted last week that the policy was a "nuclear first strike against the ad industry," put out a statement from its president and CEO, Randall Rothenberg, detailing its concerns.
The new patch will allow cookies from sites Web surfers actively visit, but block those from third-party sites that haven't been visited by the user. Often, those cookies come from advertisers and are used to track users' Web activity to better target ads.
"(Advertisers) will no longer know how many different people saw an ad or if the ad inspired someone to make a purchase," Rothenberg wrote.
From my experience, you only fix something that's either broken or abused. Cookies are not really broken, but the flood of third party cookies is pretty much an abuse and blocking them is one of the first settings that should be done in every browser installation. It's the abuse of the user's resources to show ads and, an even bigger reason, the profiling that sparked the development of projects like Ghostery and Adblock Plus. I don't want targeted ads. I won't buy something just because an ad pops up on some website. If I'm in need for a product, I will search for it and inform myself about it; and the last thing I will rely on are the promises of the manufacturer.