Jan 14, 2011 18:39 GMT  ·  By

Google is now testing a new feature in Chromium that should make privacy conscious people very happy. Hidden in the flags section, there is now the option of blocking all third-party cookies on websites, effectively only allowing cookies coming from the domain names you're currently visiting. This was actually already possible in Chrome, but the latest Chromium builds can now prevent third-party cookies that have already been created from being read.

Users have been able to block third-party cookies from being created in Chrome for a while now. However, with the feature enabled, if sites had already created third-party cookies, they could still read the existing ones.

The latest update, which is now behind a flag and can be considered in testing, should fix this problem and make even existing cookies inaccessible.

Cookies are used by most sites to store user settings, sessions and other data. However, ads or scripts on websites which are served by a third-party and come from a different domain could create cookies as well.

With the feature enabled, you can ensure that only cookies from the domain you are visiting are created which should give you a greater level of protection.

This should make behavioral targeting a bit harder to do and should protect users more from rogue advertisers, though it's probably not going to prove a huge barrier for the more determined ones.

Even as people are beginning to share more things than ever online and are more comfortable with it, as Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg would have you believe, online privacy is an increasingly thorny issue.

While there hasn't exactly been a public outcry, there are moves in the industry to make it clearer to users what data is being used and stored and when as well provide more control over their data, which can only be a good.