What are “First-Party” and “Third-Party” Cookies?
This question is answered and explained fully on our “
Web Cookie Operation” page. For now, the short answer is that a “first-party” cookie is a unique token carried by your browser with the sole purpose of uniquely identifying your web browser to the web sites you visit. Although even that might seem a bit frightening, first-party cookies are generally benign, helpful and convenient because they allow you to logon to, be known to, and be remembered by web sites you visit.
Unfortunately, this useful “remembering” facility is also being actively abused by sneaky web sites your browser never visits. These companies have figured out how to slip their “third-party” cookies into your browser through web advertisements, deliberately planted
web bugs, and other unscrupulous tricks for the express purpose of monitoring you and your browser's movements and activities across the Internet.
Perhaps the most unfortunate and disturbing fact is that the people who created your web browser know
all about this. They even provide a means for you to disable this unwanted and highly prevalent third-party surveillance. But with the single exception of Apple Computer's Safari browser,
this noxious surveillance is set to “on” by default.
You're here because we thought you would want to know,
and would probably want to turn the surveillance off.
Most users have third-party cookies enabled only because they are unaware of the serious online surveillance and privacy invasion problems which result — and also because no one ever asked them whether they would like to be placed under surveillance and have their movements tracked across the Internet.
To see how important a browser's default settings (which are rarely changed) are, the chart below shows the percentage of our visitors using
Safari last week who have chosen to enable third-party cookies
. . .
It's likely that those few Safari users who enabled third-party cookies are unaware of the consequences of having done so. But at least Apple is working to enforce the privacy of the majority of its users by default. That's certainly more than can be said about Microsoft or the developers of Firefox and Opera.
The beginning of this page invites you to take a deep breath and relax a little because, notwithstanding some functional bugs in common web browsers which we will discuss and explain,
disabling these unwanted third-party tracking cookies is quick and easy.
GRC's Web Browser Cookie Pages
These pages, and GRC's comprehensive browser
cookie forensics facility are the outgrowth of our long-standing annoyance with the fact that most popular web browsers are silently betraying their users who are completely unaware of the serious threat to their online Internet privacy created by third-party web browser cookies. This feeling is backed up by our observation that virtually all users who
are aware of this threat to their online privacy become extremely proactive in web browser cookie management.
Few people who are “in the know” don't care.
Therefore, we created our cookie monitoring and notification facility, like our ShieldsUP! facility many years before, to provide an important wake up call along with information, education, and help to users who
would care if they only knew how to maximize their online web surfing privacy.
Our "
Web Cookie Operation" page explains exactly how web browser cookies operate, and demystifies all of this first-party and third-party terminology.
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