- For example, most website that have advertisements load them from a third-party ad broker, like Google’s
- <a href="https://www.google.com/adsense/start/#?modal_active=none">Ad Sense</a>. Every time the website loads, it requests the ad
- broker to display an ad. The ad broker analyzes any information they may have about the user, looks at the current
- rate advertisers are willing to pay for their ads, and selects the one to display. The section of the website that displays
- the ads is loaded from the third-party broker’s server instead of the main server.</p>
-
- <p>Because most of the advertisements on the internet are processed by only a few brokers, it didn’t take long for them to realize
- that they could set a tracking cookie on the user’s device and know every place that user goes. Every time an ad loads from a broker,
- the first thing it does it check to see if if the device already has a unique serial number in a tracking cookie. If it does, it looks up
- the profile for that serial number and makes a note of the new site. This is why a user can do a search on one website for a
- product they typically don’t look for, like walnuts, and then suddenly start seeing advertisements for walnuts on every
- website they visit.</p>
-
- <p>In addition to ad brokers, social media sites discovered they could get in on the action. A few years ago, the major social media sites
- like Facebook and Twitter convinced a large number of websites that it would be in there best interest to place little social media
- icons on their pages. These are not just images. They contain <a href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/like-button/">embedded code</a> that
- links back to the social media site, and, among other things, loads a third-party cookie on the device. These cookies are placed even if the user does
- not have an account with the social media platform. Over time, companies like Facebook (which also runs an ad network) have built up quite a large number
- of detailed profiles about people who have <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11795248/facebook-ad-network-non-users-cookies-plug-ins">never even
- created an account on their site</a>.</p>
-
- <p>There is almost no good reason to ever enable third-party cookies. On devices with Android KitKat or older (version <= 4.4.4 or API <= 20), WebView
- does not <a href="https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/CookieManager.html#setAcceptThirdPartyCookies(android.webkit.WebView, boolean)">differentiate
- between first-party and third-party cookies</a>. Thus, enabling first-party cookies will also enable third-party cookies.</p>
+ There is no good reason to ever enable third-party cookies. Privacy Browser 3.8 removed the option, and even Google is planning to
+ <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/14/21064698/google-third-party-cookies-chrome-two-years-privacy-safari-firefox">disable them in the future</a>.
+ On devices with Android KitKat (version 4.4, API 19), WebView does not
+ <a href="https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/CookieManager.html#setAcceptThirdPartyCookies(android.webkit.WebView, boolean)">differentiate
+ between first-party and third-party cookies</a>. Thus, enabling cookies will also enable third-party cookies.</p>