141–150 of 236 posts
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As someone that doesn't dig into this data for a living, why would you not want this on non-private sessions (first question I had when reading this)? I'm curious why Mozilla wouldn't want to protect this data leaking in even a normal session.
Disclaimer: I'm the Firefox engineer who wrote the patch and the post. We did a user research study measuring website breakage under various privacy protections: https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/01/26/improving-privacy-w... tl;dr - strict-origin-when-cross-origin was one of the protections with the lowest amount of breakage. Entering Private Browsing is a clear, strong signal that the user wants more privacy, so we…
If Mozilla genuinely prioritized its users' interest it would block ads and tracking networks, which are the major way people's private information is leaked and also a primary vector for hacking. And yet for some mysterious reason Firefox hasn't broken ranks with Google by incorporating ad blocking. Even though its an obvious major feature and Firefox is losing marketshare every year. We know why Google won't priori…
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We overthink it when most of the tracking on the internet is based on simply your IP and occasionally a fingerprint of the browser(including any identification done by said browser). Since IPv4's inception that's all that was required and it was an extremely robust way to be tracked if you ask me. If you want to not be tracked you require a random/different IP and a browser fingerprint that blends with the crowd.
Most people are on mobile nowadays so IP is becoming increasingly worthless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: I'm the Firefox engineer who wrote the patch and the post. We did a user research study measuring website breakage under various privacy protections: https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/01/26/improving-privacy-w... tl;dr - strict-origin-when-cross-origin was one of the protections with the lowest amount of breakage. Entering Private Browsing is a clear, strong signal that the user wants more privacy, so we…
Why don't websites just remove ad code from pages they don't want ads to appear on, instead of telling the ad server to not display it on such pages by using the referrer information? Seems like a convoluted way to solve the problem.
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Good marketing does please users by delivering them products tailored to them that they may have never knew even existed.
Then ask the users from which page they came from, I'm sure they'll be happy to do that so that they can know about those great products.
Are there any reasons not to get rid of referers altogether?
If you have a giant traffic spike, it's nice to know where it came from. Eg. if you get linked on Hacker News, you can go to the thread and engage with potential customers.
E-commerce checkout codes, etc. are the only reasonable form of referral. In other words, if I give you something voluntarily that tells you where I came from, fine; otherwise, why do we have so much auto-leaking built into protocols?
Was very handy to find other people linking to your site, often people with similar sites to yours. Also I remember someone I know got an email that a page ge was linking to was about to move. I guess this was only possible because of the referer header.
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Then ask the users from which page they came from, I'm sure they'll be happy to do that so that they can know about those great products.
Nooo! Pleasee don't! It will be like these useless cookie warnings in EU all over www. I voluntary enable this path info if you spare me more popups.
Or just use NoScript.
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Why don't websites just remove ad code from pages they don't want ads to appear on, instead of telling the ad server to not display it on such pages by using the referrer information? Seems like a convoluted way to solve the problem.
No, the advertiser doesn’t want their ad to appear on a certain publisher’s web page (e.g. banks often can get in trouble if their ads are associated with certain kinds of content).