Browsing without Third-Party Cookies: What Do You See?

TL;DR

This study investigates the impact of blocking third-party cookies on website appearance by analyzing top websites, finding that disabling such cookies does not significantly alter page layout, text, or images, supporting privacy without user experience loss.

Contribution

The paper provides empirical evidence that blocking third-party cookies does not affect website appearance, validating privacy measures without compromising user experience.

Findings

No significant change in website layout, text, or images without third-party cookies.

Supports privacy benefits of cookieless browsing.

Industry shift towards privacy-preserving browsing is justified.

Abstract

Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party cookieless browsing, we crawled and measured the top 10,000 Tranco websites. We developed a framework to remove third-party cookies and analyze the differences between the appearance of web pages with and without these cookies. We find that disabling third-party cookies has no substantial effect on website appearance including layouts, text, and images. This validates the industry-wide shift towards cookieless browsing as a way to protect user privacy without compromising on the user experience.