Back to W3C for more.
Sites implementing such policies make their practices explicit and thus open them to public scrutiny. Browsers can help the user to understand those privacy practices with smart interfaces. Most importantly, Browsers can this way develop a predictable behavior when blocking content like cookies thus giving a real incentive to eCommerce sites to behave in a privacy friendly way. This avoids the current scattering of cookie-blocking behaviors based on individual heuristics imagined by the implementer of the blocking tool which will make the creation of stateful services on the web a pain because the state-retrieval will be unpredictable.
Oh, that’s me. Well, we don’t want to block useful cookies, so let’s take a look at the other settings.
Medium
- Blocks third-party cookies that do not have a compact privacy policy
- Blocks third-party cookies that save information that can be used to contact you without your explicit consent
- Restricts first-party cookies that save information that can be used to contact you without your implicit consent
Medium High
- Blocks third-party cookies that do not have a compact privacy policy
- Blocks third-party cookies that save information that can be used to contact you without your explicit consent
- Blocks first-party cookies that save information that can be used to contact you without your implicit consent
High
- Blocks all cookies from websites that do not have a compact privacy policy
- Blocks cookies that save information that can be used to contact you without your explicit consent
Well, Microsoft is sold on compact privacy policies, but what if our individual heuristics make us imagine that we still don’t want ANY third-party cookies. (“Heuristic” meaning “knowledge gained from experience.”)
Anyway, we can wrest control.
Click the Advanced button, and this dialog appears.
Check “Override automatic cookie handling” and you can block all third-party cookies. (But remember that you’re a “pain” to somebody out there.)
The steps are the same in Internet Explorer 6.
After that romp through Internet Explorer’s settings, Firefox 3 is gentle by comparison. Click on Tools, then the Privacy tab, and make sure “Accept third-party cookies” is not checked.