Not true, FireFox and Safari have had them off by default for over a year now. Additionally Chrome had planned to turn them off last year but then cried "covid" which for some reason = delay... because... think of the adverts! i mean covid!
Anyway, I'm pretty sure any large websites relying on 3rd party cookies for functionality will have already experienced users blocking issues. We have and have already been forced to change, we don't do ads, but our use case is a bit esoteric in that it needed 3rd party cookies for sessions.
Not quite. They will block some 3rd party tracking cookies that fall on their tracking blacklist. If you want to block all 3rd party cookies you have to explicitly disable them.
We're working to understand what legitimate use cases are broken without 3p cookies so we can work with Google to backfill them. FLOC helps ad trackers track but doesn't help with any of the legitimate uses of 3p cookies like auth.
I guess the tradeoff being made here is just leaning into our reliance on the certificate authority system. Whereas before, with third party cookies, you might have had more flexibility with how you structure your domains.
Front channel logout is also broken, part of the OIDC spec. It opens iframes to sites, but the sites don't get their cookies and can't write them.
I have sympathy for anybody with a legitimate use for third-party cookies whose life has been made more difficult by bad actors abusing features to maximise their own profits.
Same tragedy that finally caused origin-based cache partitioning at the expense of some performance.
https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1383391849902075911 (video in thread)
I don't see really any non-tracking reason for FLoC
What exactly about FLoC is making the internet less private though? Every time I see the technology it seems that it's deliberately built to keep private data in your Chrome browser and leak significantly less than anything else Ad related right now.
Also, why is WordPress allowing so many ad and anlytics tracking plugins and not considering those as security issues?
Also what's this "predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers" about? You don't need targeting for this. Heck you don't need anything for this. The way it's usually carried out is you hack some sites and redirect them to you landing page about "this one magic trick to riches, banks hate her".
Just because we can't create an ironclad solution doesn't mean that there isn't real value in reducing the usable surface area for profiling and tracking users across the web.
FLoC is an additional means of tracking users that is presently being pushed by a giant corporation who controls a significant web browser, of course anybody who is pro-user-privacy would rail against its rollout. It's ridiculous to call that an irrational reaction.
FLoC is a new thing which is just being rolled out, so it's a lot easier for people to resist adding a new thing that makes the internet more crappy and less private.
I think it's unnecessarily fatalist to say that all of this will continue to happen so what's the point of resisting it. Public awareness and negative opinion of the pervasiveness and creepiness of internet tracking continues to grow, and advocacy against tracking mechanisms helps create the type of groundswell which could actually shift public policy to forbid such tracking.
Google specifically is catching some heat for potential antitrust problems, so raising a ruckus about Google abusing its dominant browser position to cram FLoC into the internet is more likely to have positive effect than ever before.