We recently talked about a shift within Google Docs that resulted in their using a new domain name – googleusercontent.com – to store images that users upload.

The way Google stores images on various sub-domains of googleusercontent.com is a bit of a mystery to us: it isn’t just that when you upload images to your Kerika pages they get stored by Google in some seemingly-random sub-domain of googleusercontent.com, but that the location may change from day to day!

This is making it very hard to run the Chrome browser with the “Disable third-party cookies” preference turned on, because you may find that each day some of the images on your Kerika pages are not being displayed because they have suddenly shifted to a different sub-domain of googleusercontent.com – one that you haven’t previously whitelisted.

Firefox used to have a very simple way of whitelisting domains for which you were happy to get cookies, but that disappeared several versions.

Chrome doesn’t offer any easy way of whitelisting domains either, presumably because Google is strongly in favor of third-party cookies since these underpin so much advertising. There’s an extension for Chrome called “Vanilla Cookies” that supposed to allow you to whitelist domains using wildcards, but it doesn’t seem to solve the whack-a-mole problem with googleusercontent.com as far as we can tell.

Now, your only options appear to be:

• Disable all third-party cookies, which means that images you upload to your Kerika pages are not shown because they are being stored somewhere on googleusercontent.com, which is a third-party since it is neither kerika.com nor google.com, or
• Allow all third-party cookies which means all sorts of junk can find its way onto your computer.