23 October
What happened on this date in privacy, anonymity networks and censorship. Every year on the same date we add a new look back and keep the earlier ones as they were.
2026
Third-party tracking cookies in your browser
If you keep seeing the same ad on different websites, an advertiser may be using third-party cookies (small files stored in your browser by ad or analytics services embedded in web pages) to recognize you across sites. Firefox 63, released on 23 October 2018, added content blocking, letting users turn on blocking of third-party tracking cookies or of all trackers. Mozilla said that day it aimed to block third-party tracking cookies by default in Firefox 65, and version 69 in September 2019 did so for all desktop and Android users (new users from June), while Safari has fully blocked third-party cookies by default since March 2020. According to Google's April 2025 announcement, Chrome will not show a separate prompt about third-party cookies, and its help page (checked in October 2026) shows that users can block them under Privacy and security in the settings. In Japan, the privacy regulator's guidelines give an individual's browsing history collected through cookies as an example of personally referable information, a category the law defines separately from personal information.
Also on this day
- The OpenNet Initiative published an update on information controls in Burma, citing reports from the country that the long-blocked websites of BBC, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia had become accessible from September 2011. Source: OpenNet Initiative
- A US federal district court dismissed the Wikimedia Foundation's lawsuit challenging a mass surveillance program of the National Security Agency, and Wikimedia's post that day said it expected to appeal. Source: Wikimedia blog