Advocacy group tells UK competition watchdog proposal favors Google

Exclusive Movement for an Open Web (MOW), an advocacy group that supports web publishers, has filed a complaint with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) challenging the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) call to eliminate third-party cookies.

The term "cookies" refers to HTTP cookies, data sent by a server to a web user's browser. These key-value pairs serve various functions, such as session management, personalization, analytics, and tracking. They can be set by first-party sites – the site being visited – or by third-party sites if the publisher's web application code provides the necessary support.

Third-party cookies (3PCs) have long posed a privacy problem because they allow organizations with no relationship to web users to track their online browsing activities, often without legitimately obtained consent. While cookie-based tracking of this sort may not involve personally identifiable information (PII), it can be combined with other data sets to ...