- 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/">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 their 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 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
+ 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