A browser vendor who peddles privacy and uses "not google chrome" as its selling point, decides to track its users and sell the data to google. Hackernews absolutely explodes, as it considers tracking evil (unless its them doing it). The rest bikesheds on privacy policy and nothing of value was lost.
Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
161–170 of 179 posts
Re: Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody reads those and you know it. The reason people use Firefox is to not get tracked by Google. If you care about privacy, blind trust is never something you should have. This has all the trappings of a mistake to me. A group of developers responsible for developing one area (the add-ons page), was not considering the impact it might have on another (the browser developers). Perhaps they should find a different…
Someone submitted a PR to Mozilla to fix this, and the Mozilla devs closed it, arguing that Google Analytics does not count as tracking. See: https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/pull/2787#issueco... The TOR devs are fixing this part in their browser, and their comment was: > Disallow `about:addons` unless the extensions directory is volatile, because regardless of what Mozilla PR says about respecting privacy,…
Check that issue again. Before you posted this they agreed and pushed the issue to the add-ons team. Do not track should turn off Analytics.
But that's not my point. As I said, they could well be wrong, but it's over the top to argue that it's Mozilla's fault for disclosing this in the privacy policy (which apparently no one reads). If you are so privacy conscious that this bothers you that much, the privacy policy should be required reading.
Re: Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone submitted a PR to Mozilla to fix this, and the Mozilla devs closed it, arguing that Google Analytics does not count as tracking. See: https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/pull/2787#issueco... The TOR devs are fixing this part in their browser, and their comment was: > Disallow `about:addons` unless the extensions directory is volatile, because regardless of what Mozilla PR says about respecting privacy,…
Check that issue again. Before you posted this they agreed and pushed the issue to the add-ons team. Do not track should turn off Analytics. But that's not my point. As I said, they could well be wrong, but it's over the top to argue that it's Mozilla's fault for disclosing this in the privacy policy (which apparently no one reads). If you are so privacy conscious that this bothers you that much, the privacy policy s…
> If you are so privacy conscious that this bothers you that much, the privacy policy should be required reading.
No, this is something that by law I have to be informed about. And Mozilla has a reputation of working for their users, so I actually trusted them.
I do agree with you after this, the trust was misplaced, Mozilla is not any better than Google, NSA, MfS/Stasi or GeStaPo, just not giving a single fuck about privacy, but I did trust them before this, and so did many others.
In fact, people only used Mozilla products because of this trust.
Re: Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
#164Interesting comment by Gorhill from the above discussion: >> I thought web extensions couldn't block that content. > I just ran a couple of tests, and I believe you are correct. > Legacy uBlock Origin can block the network request to GA. > However webext-hybrid uBO as per Network pane in dev tools does not block it. Same for pure webext Ghostery, the network request to GA was not blocked, again as per Network pane in…
Sounds like a bug to be filed. I'd encourage people to try the webext versions of those add-ons so we can catch things like this in time for 57.
I installed the latest Firefox Aurora (55.08b), latest uBlock0.webext.xpi and a MITM proxy.
uBlock WebExt does not block GA.
I added a specific filter for the GA domain, but still uBlock failed to block again.
Unrelated, I noticed Firefox also made a connection to aus5.mozilla.org which sets cookies named _ga and _gid.
Re: Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
#165 As I mentioned in #1107: we will not be
removing analytics support entirely. It
is extremely useful to us and we have
already weighed the cost/benefit of
using tracking.
Mozilla Developer also mentioned:
Actually, @muffinresearch pointed out we could probably just observe Do Not Track here,
because this pane is actually a web page loaded in an iFrame inside the browser page.
That might be faster to ship. Just thinking aloud :smile:
I'm definitely for giving users the option to disable this.
- 1984, George Orwell.
Re: Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
#166Howdy all, Kev Needham here, and I'm the Product Manager for add-ons. I want to make sure everyone understands that we're going to be making changes.
Some parts of Firefox populate the content of some “about:” pages (like about:addons) from web-based sources. Thanks to your comments, we better appreciate how users may not know that content in those pages can come from a web service, and can use third-party analytics. We don’t like to surprise our community, and are disappointed that we did.
It's always been important for us to use Google Analytics and other analytic services in a way that meets the expectations of Firefox users. We have taken great care to ensure that our partnership with Google is structured so that they are prohibited from creating user profiles from our website data, or from tracking users across other websites. We also need to help ensure that we are clear where Mozilla products and services make use of those services.
We want to make sure we follow our “no surprises” rule (https://www.mozilla.org/privacy/principles/) , so we are exploring solutions that inform our users about how these pages in Firefox use web content and analytics tools - and provide our users with tools to better control the data that may be sent. We’ll be making changes in the near term, and will publish updates as we make progress.
Re: Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would this allow de-anonymization? Does the request not go through the Tor network?
I changed the wording of my post, but generally, the Tor Browser uses NoScript to block Google Analytics anywhere to improve security, and this page circumvents that, allowing Google Analytics to be loaded. This provides significantly more tracking information than if no GA script was ever loaded. Additionally, that page has special access to allow installing addons, or removing them, and the Google Analytics script…
You'd still see an installation doorhanger.
Fore sure, this will leak info you'd rather not, but I see no evidence it allows de-anonymization. If it did, any custom tracking NoScript doesn't know about would defeat Tor.
And that's not the case.
Re: Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Siloing the GA data that is obtained from Mozilla (required by the contract Mozilla has with Google) would stop the privacy-breaking aspects (which exist due to aggregating over sites). But this may be a case where even though Mozilla is technically doing the right thing, perceptions will tend the opposite way. Without that statement in that old bug, most people would never know the Mozilla GA data is siloed.
Siloing, schmiloing. If the user has installed an extension that blocks Google Analytics, and you disable that extension, you're clearly ignoring the user's privacy choices.
WebExtensions are never active on about:* pages, that's a documented design choice not specific to content blockers or GA or whatever.
Note that old-style extensions do work and currently still block this.
Re: Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a bug to be filed. I'd encourage people to try the webext versions of those add-ons so we can catch things like this in time for 57.
I installed the latest Firefox Aurora (55.08b), latest uBlock0.webext.xpi and a MITM proxy. uBlock WebExt does not block GA. I added a specific filter for the GA domain, but still uBlock failed to block again. Unrelated, I noticed Firefox also made a connection to aus5.mozilla.org which sets cookies named _ga and _gid.
Doesn't block it generally, or doesn't block it for the "Get Add-ons" page?
The latter is expected. The former isn't. In any case you should report this to the author, not here.
Re: Firefox tracks users with Google Analytics in the add-on settings
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Granted disguising things as a bug is also one of the sneakier and better ways to implement the feature if that was the intent to begin with ;-)
It's more that the people implementing and reviewing the feature (cough) didn't expect about:* pages to end up loading frigging Google Analytics.