Get fucked, advertisers.
Advertisers track you with device fingerprinting and behaviour profiling now. Firefox doesn’t do much to obscure the more advanced methods of tracking.
Lots do. But do you know anyone that turns JS off anymore? Platforms don’t care if they miss the odd user for this - because almost no one will be missed.
Not all but most, yes. But TBF, sites that still function with JS disabled tend to have the least intrusive telemetry, and might pre-date big data altogether.
Regardless, unless the extent of a page’s analytics is a “you are the #th visitor” counter, all countermeasures must remain active.
It’s really strange how they specifically mention HTML5 canvas when you can run any fingerprinter test on the internet and see that Firefox does nothing to obfuscate that. You can run a test in Incognito mode, start a new session on a VPN, run another test, and on Firefox your fingerprint will be identical.
Honestly would be hard to do. There a perfectly legitimate and everyday uses for pretty much everything used in fingerprinting. Taking them away or obscuring them in one way or another would break so much.
Librewolf has Resist Fingerprinting which comes pretty far.
Every Librewolf browser uses the same windows user agent, etc. But there are downsides, like time zones don’t work, and sites don’t use dark mode by default.
And even then, EFF’s Cover Your Tracks site can still uniquely identify me, mainly through window size. That’s one of the reasons why Tor Browser uses letterboxing to make the window size consistent.
For those who don’t care to read the full article:
This basically just confines any cookies generated on a page, to just that page.
So, instead of a cookie from, say, Facebook, being stored on site A, then requested for tracking purposes on site B, each individual site would be sent its own separate Facebook cookie, that only gets used on that site, preventing it from tracking you anywhere outside of the specific site you got it from in the first place.
Hahahahaha so it doesn’t break anything that still relies on cookies, but neuters the ability to share them.
That’s awesome
Honestly, I thought that’s how it already worked.
Edit: I think what I’m remembering is that you can define the cookies by site/domain, and restrict to just those. And normally would, for security reasons.
But some asshole sites like Facebook are cookies that are world-readable for tracking, and this breaks that.
Someone correct me if I got it wrong.
Total Cookie Protection was already a feature, (introduced on Feb 23st 2021) but it was only for people using Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) on strict mode.
They had a less powerful third-party cookie blocking feature for users that didn’t have ETP on strict mode, that blocked third party cookies on specific block lists. (i.e. known tracking companies)
This just expanded that original functionality, by making it happen on any domain, and have it be the default for all users, rather than an opt-in feature of Enhanced Tracking Protection.
They’ve been doing this with container tabs, so this must be the successor to that idea (I’m going to assume they’ll still have container tabs).
Isn’t this basically Firefox’s version of the third party cookie block that Chrome rolled out a few months ago? Or am I missing something here?
I mean, it’s good news either way but I just want to know if this is somehow different or better.
Disabling cross site cookie is already a thing for decades…
Same with Do Not Track requests.
Do Not Track has never really done anything, it just asks websites politely to not track you. There’s no legal or technical limitation here.
I still much rather have it than not. It also lead to the spiritual successor GPC which does actually have regulatory requirements under the CCPA.
Disabling cross site cookies and allowing them to exist while siloed within the specific sites that need them are two different things.
Previous methods of disabling cross site cookies would often break functionality, or prevent a site from using their own analytics software that they contracted out from a third party.
Thank you for your explanation, tbat greatly clears up my confusion.
TBH, if a person’s concern is being tracked by, for example, Facebook; then this just lets Facebook continue tracking them without directly allowing Facebook’s anaylitics customers to track them to another site directly (but indirectly that information can still be provided). But I guess for all the people giving FB and Google those proviledges better to have this than not.
I think this tips it over the edge for me to switch to Firefox
I unironically miss Netscape Communicator. Yes most of that went into Firefox but not all and I really miss the frame layout.
As long as it’s not Chromium, I’m happy people aren’t just handing over the keys to the Internet to Google.
Yeah, Waterfox is just another browser built on top of the Mozilla’s GECKO engine. But without all the AI dickriding.
I haven’t seen anything to signal Mozilla is untrustworthy other than from that one right wing guy with a chip on his shoulder.
Most of the revenue of Mozilla Corporation comes from Google (81% in 2022[2]) in exchange of making it the default search engine in Firefox.
Source: wikipedia
Other issues I have with Firefox is the telemetry bits, the way they handle some of their employees (laying one guy off because he has cancer), the lack of meaningful updates and features in the last decade, CEO granting herself a nice pay rise after doing well nothing really. The list goes on and on honestly.
Don’t get me wrong, you should still use Firefox or a Firefox derived browser if you care about a free internet. I myself use firefox (although I just switched to Zen browser on my PC which is based on Firefox). However we shouldn’t be blind ourselves just because we hate anything google based and/or closed sourced. Firefox is still back by a for profit company which is, as I quoted earlier, backed at least by 80% by google.
For the positive side now it seems that in the last 2-3 months firefox has been pumping out meaningful updates (even on mobile). Things seem to be taking a positive turn recently and I’m actually a bit excited to see where firefox is going to go from here.
The Mozilla Corporation is a for profit entity owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which lets them claim to be a nonprofit, which is a sketchy looking way to set up and promote your business if nothing else. They get most of their money from Google and they’ve been riding AI like all the other unethical companies.
I see absolutely no reason to give them a chance, either. Just use an actual open source build instead of the mainstream one.
Aren’t cookies already limited to the site at which they were created??
What the fuck? You mean to tell me sites have been sharing cookies?
I thought all browsers only delivered cookies back to the same site.
The problem is that a website is generally not served from one domain.
Put a Facebook like button on your website, it’s loaded directly from Facebook servers. Now they can put a cookie on your computer with an identifier.
Now every site you visit with a Facebook like button, they know it was you. They can watch you as you move around the web.
Google does this at a larger scale. Every site with Google ads on it. Every site using Google analytics. Every site that embeds a Google map. They can stick a cookie in and know you were there.
Yes, it’s the reason for the tracking. To sell more targeted ads.
If you’re up for reading some shennanigans, check out the book Mindf*ck. It’s about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, written by a whistleblower, and details election manipulation using data collected from Facebook and other public or purchased data.
Put a Facebook like button on your website, it’s loaded directly from Facebook servers. Now they can put a cookie on your computer with an identifier.
Which is not allowed by GDPR btw, because they do that even if you don’t click them. There are plenty guides online, how to create your own, not tracking, facebook like button.
How does GDPR fit in to Google Analytics and personalised ads?
I would have thought it went something like: random identifier: not linked to personal info, just a collection of browsing history for an unidentified person, not under GDPR as not personal info.
Link to account: let them request deletion (or more specifically, delinking the info from your account is what Facebook lets you do), GDPR compliant.
Both Google and Facebook run analytics software that tracks users. I presume letting people request deletion once it’s personally linked to them is probably what let’s them do it? But I don’t live in a GDPR country, so I don’t know a whole lot about it.
It doesn’t have to be. Your browser sends the cookies for a domain with every request to that domain. So you have a website example.com, that embeds a Facebook like button from Facebook.com.
When your browser downloads the page, it requests the different pieces of the page. It requests the main page from example.com, your browser sends any example.com cookies with the request.
Your browser needs the javascript, it sends the cookie in the request to get the JavaScript file. It needs the like button, it sends a request off to Facebook.com and sends the Facebook.com cookies with it.
Note that the request to example.com doesn’t send the cookies for Facebook.com, and the request to Facebook.com doesn’t send the cookie for example.com to Facebook. However, it does tell Facebook.com that the request for the like button came from example.com.
Facebook puts an identifier in the cookie, and any request to Facebook sends that cookie and the site it was loaded on.
So you log in to Facebook, it puts an identifier in your cookies. Now whenever you go to other sites with a Facebook like button (or the Facebook analytics stuff), Facebook links that with your profile.
Not logged in? Facebook sets an identifier to track you anyway, and links it up when you make an account or log in.
I know Facebook and Reddit are in cahoots.
I went to visit Reddit a couple weeks back to read the Deadpool & Wolverine comments, but used the wrong container tab and now Facebook feeds me endless Marvel related stuff.
A lot of it is culture war bullshit too. Hmmmmm 🤔
oh i know how this works and its not the way you think. Its somehow better and worse at the same time
Im going to describe the process using a hypothetical situation:
You decide to try a new shampoo but you’re not sure what to buy. You ask your friend “hey what shampoo do you use” and they tell you they use Head and Shoulders.
Later that night, you google head and shoulders and read reviews
The next day, your friend gets Head and Shoulders ads on youtube and facebook and Instagram, etc
This is because google knows both of your locations and search history. It sees that you two were within a few feet of each for hours and decides to shoot ads at you both, based on what either of you have searched recently.
This is called proximity targetted advertising and i think its gross.
But this is why so many people say things like “we were talking about it and now im seeing ads they must be spying on me”
No, you don’t know anything. Just because you have a suspicion because something happened to you once doesn’t mean you are sure in any way.
Nah I’m sure.
I never once saw a post about Marvel fed to me by Facebook and now it’s constant
NO.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_cookies
Maybe it’s not allowed in your local jurisdiction? But it’s been a problem since forever.
