You can (and should) block 3rd party cookies in your web browser settings.

DD:

Thanks for the tip – I did know of it but find it doesn't always work for me.

The Chrome browser is another of Google's tools for harvesting data about users. By using it, you are playing Google's game and supplying Google with data about yourself and your activities that you might not (should not) want shared or sold.

Chromium is the free, open-source version of Chrome. It is touted as being more private and more secure than Chrome, but there's still bits of Google in it. It's probably a step in the right direction, but not far enough. 'Ungoogled chromium' is a development of Chromium that aims to remove as much as possible of Google's dirty tricks from the browser. Wikipedia has a page on it.

Browsers are just too complicated, with all sorts of strange functions operating. Even Firefox is suspect. For the paranoid, there are many of its settings that can and should be changed from default values, but it's a little tedious. Remember, if you're 'connected', someone is trying to harvest data from your device, and, unless you take steps, little is done to frustrate them by default.

Also, use a script blocker. You can turn off many of Google's scripts with impunity.

Not sure about "even" …. FF is a lot more (unnecessarily) complicated than it used to be. The result of trying to compete with Chrome perhaps.

A couple of days ago my esr version (which is supposed to be rather less "beta" than the regular release) wanted to update. So I said OK.

Now I can't log on to my online banking with FF. Turning off all the add-ons doesn't help. Thank goodness I also have an installation of Vivaldi.

It's hard to generalise what will be blocked. The ones on the side here are not being blocked because they are simple images hosted from this site itself rather than something like google ads.

It does sometimes cause issues with websites not working correctly because external scripts and such are blocked. If that happens you can just temporarily disable it (or disable it for specific sites) by clciking the adblockers icon in the top right of your browser. It gets very granular if you want full control.