734689 - do not automatically enable "Accept third-party cookies" when "Accept cookies from sites" is enabled

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Mr. I. M. Williams]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2
Build ID: 20120215223356

Steps to reproduce:

Clicked in the "Accept cookies from sites" tick-box.


Actual results:

When the "Accept cookies from sites" option is enabled a tick is also placed, automatically, in the "Accept third-party cookies" tick-box thus, also, enabling this option.


Expected results:

Since this is an issue of privacy and security and third-party cookies are neither desirable nor neccesary, I would expect that "Accept third-party cookies" to be an opt-in choice instead of being an opt-out option as presently implemented.

Would it be possible to consider changing this behaviour so as to improve Firefox privacy by making it neccesary to choose to place a tick in the "Accept third-party cookies" should they be desired?

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Private Browsing if for the private browsing mode.

Comment 2

[Thomas Ahlblom]

A similar issue has has been discussed years ago in bug 324397. (But that discussion was about a hidden pref.)

Comment 3

[[e-mail]]

In FF 17.0.7 ESR, the handling is wrong. If "Accept third party cookies" is unticked, it does not stay that way after a restart. It reverts to accepting them.

This is a significant privacy/tracking issue.

Comment 4

[Mr. I. M. Williams]

I agree with "Comment 3".
The implementaion of "Accept third party cookies" is essentially no different to the previous situation in that you still have to disable third party cookies each time primary cookies are enabled.
Also it is not even neccesary to perform a "restart", simply disabling cookies and then subsequently re-enabling them results in "Accept third party cookies" revering to "Always"

Comment 5

[[e-mail]]

It is worse than explained in Comment 4. Once Third party cookies have been disabled, even without making any other changes to cookie handling, the next time you start FF, the setting has changed back to Accept third party cookies. Unless you check each time you start FF, it will always accept third party cookies.

Comment 6

[KLB]

The options as they relate to cookies have been completely rejiggered since this bug was filed.  So I'm not sure this bug is relevant any longer. I'm not a fan of 3rd party cookies and have them set to "ask" in my profile. I do not, however, see it as that hard to change cookie settings to what I want.

I agree that 3rd party cookies have privacy implications, however, the default configuration of Firefox has to work the way everyone expects it to work including accepting cookies. I'm pretty sure this is a "won't fix" bug.

BTW: The issue described in comment 5 is no longer an issue the third-party cookie option maintains its settings properly.

Comment 7

[triedre68-campidu]

I agree the initial request.

This bug is still present on version 36.0

As said before "this is an issue of privacy and security and third-party cookies are neither desirable nor neccesary".

"Accept third-party cookies" should be an opt-in choice instead of being an opt-out option and ... the enjoyment of publicists.