Wednesday, November 24, 2010

But what if I don't want any cookies?

Google's Chrome browser is a very efficient browser for surfing the web. It's safe, speedy, auto updating and does just about everything I need it to. Or it did...


With the latest update they removed the ability to determine white sites are able to leave cookies. Well, that's not entirely true, but they certainly made it a lot harder to control. When I surf, I generally dislike allowing cookies unless it is required for the functionality of a site that I trust. Until recently Chrome allowed me to set all sites to prompt me for permission to leave a cookie. I'd get the alert and depending on the site, either allow all for that site, or block all for that site. As I was surfing, when I encountered a new site, I'd click a YES or a NO and that was it. It was a small extra step, but something that I felt gave me a little extra control over privacy (or the illusion of).

Now, Google has changed the options to allow all cookies or block all cookies (or "local content" as they're calling it). They allow you to set exceptions for sites as you want, but you have to go into the options menu a couple of steps and add them manually. A bit of a nuisance. Actually, enough of a nuisance that I bet they're counting on people not bothering. That's a pitty. Buzz on the Internet is that people are talking about abandoning Chrome over this one feature. I'm not sure I'm to that point yet, but I must say that this is definitely the first negative thing I've got to say about Chrome.

Google is known for making things better for us, before we even think of it. In this case I think that they over stepped the duty.

I'm hoping that Google will listen to posts like this one and all the others in the help forums, etc and give us back some control.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Have you filed a bug? If you think standard cookies are an issue, google "ever cookies" and find out how many places cookies can go. Hate to say it but, the battle over cookies is essentially over.
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/researcher-claims-evercookie-cant-be-removed-092210