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First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

ctrl.blog

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Re: First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

#31

Post by d2wa »

Klover wrote: post #29
d2wa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effort have been made at keeping the impact of ads and tracking low: https://www.ctrl.blog/about/privacy-policy#privacy-policy-ad... The ads help fund writing and research into technologies that restrict ads without blocking them outright. You choosing to block ads is your choice, but it takes away incentives for researching and writing about the topics you care to read about. You can sign-up for Flattr if you prefer…

That’s genius! Using trackers to research not using trackers.. so why don’t you use more privacy oriented analytics instead of google analytics? Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) seems like a better choice, unless that option is exactly what you’re researching. I don’t mean to be so snarky. Your comment seems so hypocritical to me, though.

I’ve been contributing to the privacy-first design of Fathom. https://usefathom.com/ I don’t use if myself as its not all that useful at this time. There is actually a second tracking system in place that records things like the number of people who block ads and analytics.

Google Analytics (GA) on the site is configured to delete data as early as possible and it’s configured to not store IPs or link activities. However, its the only way to get any page-level reporting (like which pages are profitable) out of AdSense.

Re: First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

#32

Post by d2wa »

Klover wrote: post #29
d2wa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effort have been made at keeping the impact of ads and tracking low: https://www.ctrl.blog/about/privacy-policy#privacy-policy-ad... The ads help fund writing and research into technologies that restrict ads without blocking them outright. You choosing to block ads is your choice, but it takes away incentives for researching and writing about the topics you care to read about. You can sign-up for Flattr if you prefer…

That’s genius! Using trackers to research not using trackers.. so why don’t you use more privacy oriented analytics instead of google analytics? Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) seems like a better choice, unless that option is exactly what you’re researching. I don’t mean to be so snarky. Your comment seems so hypocritical to me, though.

Matomo has completely unacceptable impact on client-side page loading performance. The way it stores data also makes it difficult to do anything useful with the data.

Re: First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

#33

Post by d2wa »

Manishearth wrote: post #30
d2wa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effort have been made at keeping the impact of ads and tracking low: https://www.ctrl.blog/about/privacy-policy#privacy-policy-ad... The ads help fund writing and research into technologies that restrict ads without blocking them outright. You choosing to block ads is your choice, but it takes away incentives for researching and writing about the topics you care to read about. You can sign-up for Flattr if you prefer…

I don't use an adblocker -- I just use Firefox with tracking protection on. I'm okay with ads, just not track-y heavy ads, and Tracking Protection does the trick. You may want to look into why Tracking Protection doesn't like your ads.

It’s because tracking protection blocks ads based on domains. It doesn’t recognize that AdSense can serve non-personalized ads that don’t track you. Privacy Badger has the same design limitation.

Firefox and Privacy Badger should want to promote the use of non-personalized non-tracking ads, but allowing well-behaved ads isn’t really a priority.

Re: First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

#34

Post by dsr_ »

d2wa wrote: post #32
Klover wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s genius! Using trackers to research not using trackers.. so why don’t you use more privacy oriented analytics instead of google analytics? Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) seems like a better choice, unless that option is exactly what you’re researching. I don’t mean to be so snarky. Your comment seems so hypocritical to me, though.

Matomo has completely unacceptable impact on client-side page loading performance. The way it stores data also makes it difficult to do anything useful with the data.

ISTR that Matomo also has a log-analysis mode where you don't insert anything into your content, and therefore does not affect performance at all.

Re: First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

#35

Post by d2wa »

dsr_ wrote: post #34
d2wa wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matomo has completely unacceptable impact on client-side page loading performance. The way it stores data also makes it difficult to do anything useful with the data.

ISTR that Matomo also has a log-analysis mode where you don't insert anything into your content, and therefore does not affect performance at all.

Ah. Log analysis hasn’t been useful for years. Browsers pre-fetch and pre-render documents that are never viewed by anyone. You need client-side scripting to know whether a request is for a human or just browsers trying to preemptively load things in expectation of user interaction.

Re: First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

#36

Post by jstanley »

d2wa wrote: post #33
Manishearth wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use an adblocker -- I just use Firefox with tracking protection on. I'm okay with ads, just not track-y heavy ads, and Tracking Protection does the trick. You may want to look into why Tracking Protection doesn't like your ads.

It’s because tracking protection blocks ads based on domains. It doesn’t recognize that AdSense can serve non-personalized ads that don’t track you. Privacy Badger has the same design limitation. Firefox and Privacy Badger should want to promote the use of non-personalized non-tracking ads, but allowing well-behaved ads isn’t really a priority.

Why do you believe that Google aren't tracking people? If they have the technological capability to do so they almost certainly do, even if they happen to serve non-personalised ads while doing it.

Re: First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

#37

Post by d2wa »

jstanley wrote: post #36
d2wa wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because tracking protection blocks ads based on domains. It doesn’t recognize that AdSense can serve non-personalized ads that don’t track you. Privacy Badger has the same design limitation. Firefox and Privacy Badger should want to promote the use of non-personalized non-tracking ads, but allowing well-behaved ads isn’t really a priority.

Why do you believe that Google aren't tracking people? If they have the technological capability to do so they almost certainly do, even if they happen to serve non-personalised ads while doing it.

Because technology alone can’t protect your privacy. You need to trust people. Google says they don’t track ads when configured to not-track. They provide technical details on what this means. It’s designed around the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). At some point there has to be trust. I trust that Google won’t risk millions of Euros in fines over lying about not tracking people.

Re: First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

#38

Post by jstanley »

d2wa wrote: post #37
jstanley wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe that Google aren't tracking people? If they have the technological capability to do so they almost certainly do, even if they happen to serve non-personalised ads while doing it.

Because technology alone can’t protect your privacy. You need to trust people. Google says they don’t track ads when configured to not-track. They provide technical details on what this means. It’s designed around the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). At some point there has to be trust. I trust that Google won’t risk millions of Euros in fines over lying about not tracking people.

> Because technology alone can’t protect your privacy.

Technology alone actually does allow us to choose between "send data to Google and trust that they won't do anything bad" vs. "don't send data to Google and know that they won't do anything bad".

EDIT: I appreciate that you care about privacy. You care about it a lot more than most websites seem to, so it does seem unfair that you're getting more flak in this thread than most websites do even though they run more trackers than you do.

I notice this pattern a lot, in myself and others. When there's a choice between a solution that solves no problems, and a solution that tries to solve the problems but only manages half of them, the latter solution tends to get criticised for the half of the problems it doesn't solve, and the first solution doesn't get criticised at all.

Don't really know what I'm trying to say. Just that the criticism you're getting in this thread (some of it from me) isn't entirely justified, and I'm glad you care about privacy, even if you don't go about it the same way I do.

Re: First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

#39

Post by Rjevski »

d2wa wrote: post #31
Klover wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s genius! Using trackers to research not using trackers.. so why don’t you use more privacy oriented analytics instead of google analytics? Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) seems like a better choice, unless that option is exactly what you’re researching. I don’t mean to be so snarky. Your comment seems so hypocritical to me, though.

I’ve been contributing to the privacy-first design of Fathom. https://usefathom.com/ I don’t use if myself as its not all that useful at this time. There is actually a second tracking system in place that records things like the number of people who block ads and analytics. Google Analytics (GA) on the site is configured to delete data as early as possible and it’s configured to not store IPs or link activities. Howe…

It’s cute that you think asking a hostile actor to be nice and delete data early and not store some of it would actually work when their bottom line directly depends on them doing so.

They can very well pretend not to do it while secretly still tracking & storing everything.

Re: First-party isolation in Firefox: what breaks if you enable it?

#40

Post by jasonkostempski »

d2wa wrote: post #25
jstanley wrote: post #24

I like most of what you said and agree with the cause. But why does your own blog load up with an apparently-unironic call to be whitelisted in Adblock? If you don't want to be tracked by other people's ads, why are you helping track people with ads on your own site? The page also loads Google Analytics.

Effort have been made at keeping the impact of ads and tracking low: https://www.ctrl.blog/about/privacy-policy#privacy-policy-ad... The ads help fund writing and research into technologies that restrict ads without blocking them outright. You choosing to block ads is your choice, but it takes away incentives for researching and writing about the topics you care to read about. You can sign-up for Flattr if you prefer…

Advertise natively, don't track. It's that simple, no need for research. Our ancestors did it for hundreds of years. There is no acceptable level of tracking.
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