[RaSoJo]

This ship has sailed. The deprecation of 3rd party cookies will impact only the small ad-companies (the few that are still afloat)

The behemoths of the industry (GOOG, FB, MSFT, AMZN) have moved beyond cookies to tracking users at an ID level. And with data sharing agreements in place [1] the big guys can track users across the spectrum.

Personal anecdote: Couple of days back me and a buddy were chatting over WhatsApp about a particular college. Neither of us had any affiliation to this college, and the college had come up in passing. Couple of hours later, I began receiving ads on my Gmail about that _very same college_

Naysayers might refute and put it down to recency bias. But this is just one example. I have noticed many others where my data has moved between GOOG n FB products in almost real time.

The deprecation of 3rd party cookies will make the small time companies scramble to figure out alternatives, which will invariably be super expensive. Thereby leading to further deaths of the independent entities.

So who is going to benefit from this deprecation? GOOG/FB/MSFT/AMZN again. Yay!

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/google-secretly-g...

[SahAssar]

So not only are you alleging that Meta scans your whatsapp messages for advertising purposes (which they strongly claim they don't do), you are also alleging that they are selling your whatsapp messages to Google?

That's some serious accusations. Without strong proof I don't believe it.

[ninjanomnom]

I assumed they were saying that they'd received an email ad, not that google served an ad. I could be wrong though. I wouldn't trust what meta says here considering their past history, but there are reasonable alternate sources in this case. Keyboard replacements on phones are notorious for logging, or either participant could have an app logging screenshots.

[RegW]

In Antonio Garcia Martinez's 2016 book "Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine", he talks about a deal done between Google and Facebook to exchange data. So I'm pretty sure that would be happening.

Not so sure about Facebook analyzing your WhatsApp traffic, because they make such a big thing in their advertising about the secure end-to-end encryption and privacy. Surely they would get roasted if it was found not to be true. Of course it's always possible with a closed source app.

The technique discussed in Darknet Diaries episode 146 (about the ANOM phone) involved duplicating the message to [an] archive endpoint. It mentions Google providing text archival as a service for company phones, and it seems this also happens for WhatsApp. However, are Facebook also purloining your private WhatsApps? Are they using them to target you? Who can say?

https://www.waterstones.com/book/chaos-monkeys/antonio-garci...

https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/146/

https://www.telemessage.com/mobile-archiver/whatsapp-archive...

[RegW]

On reflection, I think a more likely explanation is that Facebook just harvested, used and shared your WhatsApp metadata. Metadata analysis doesn't seem to count as an invasion of privacy in the modern world.

So while you and your friend chatted about this college, perhaps your friend googled it.

FB might then share with Google that you connected with your fiend at that particular time, and Google connected your exchange with the search.

Of course this assumes there is some way to tie your FB and Google accounts together - like matching up shared FB & Google tracker journeys across the internet.

[account42]

Users also benefit even if only a little.

But yes, blocking third-party cookies is not enough on its own. We need even MORE privacy protections, both technological and legislative.

[Ekaros]

Are you using Android? It could also be WhatsApp backup... Which don't make it any less messed up and could probably be criminal in some countries.