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

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.