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

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

#41

Post by Rjevski »

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.

In an alternate world where the advertising industry is respectful I would agree.

In our current world the advertising industry has demonstrated their inability to self-regulate, and even Google isn’t any better (see the recent issues regarding Android tracking locations even when the option was set to off).

GDPR is irrelevant in that case. If the tracking happens in such a way that it’s impossible to tell from outside Google then nobody will have grounds to sue.

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

#42

Post by d2wa »

jstanley wrote: post #38
d2wa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thr…

Sure. And if you block all ads and form of measurements, people will stop creating content you like. Then Google won’t know anything about the lack of content in your fields of interest. Great solution.

Just look at the market for “Linux news” websites. Linux usage is up across the board (including desktop installations), but the target audience are all blocking ads so there are barely any websites left that cater to people who’re interested in that content category.

People don’t like paying for content. There is few feasible micro-payment schemes around (because of the high payment service fees) and the few that try have few users. Ads enable free content to be produced in great quantities on the most niche subjects imaginable. Unless you have a great funding model that can replace ads, we have to find ways to limit what tracking ads can do (FPI) without outright blocking them.

Adblockers don’t just block ads. It blocks funding to creative efforts.

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

#43

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

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.

I’m curious - could you explain that impact? I use Matomo and had not noticed it.

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

#44

Post by smichel17 »

d2wa wrote: post #42
jstanley wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thr…

Sure. And if you block all ads and form of measurements, people will stop creating content you like. Then Google won’t know anything about the lack of content in your fields of interest. Great solution. Just look at the market for “Linux news” websites. Linux usage is up across the board (including desktop installations), but the target audience are all blocking ads so there are barely any websites left that cater to…

> Unless you have a great funding model that can replace ads

This is what we're trying to do at Snowdrift.coop (I am a volunteer). There's already a good introduction at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop, so I'm just going to link there and quote the beginning:

> Snowdrift.coop [is] a non-profit cooperative platform for funding freely-licensed works everyone can use and share without limitations.

> Our core feature is a new fundraising approach we call crowdmatching. Patrons donate together by all agreeing to match one another instead of donating unilaterally.

We also have a new 1 minute intro video[1], if you'd prefer that format. Note: the low streaming quality is a quirk of archive.org; you can get higher by downloading the webm.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/snowdrift-dot-coop-intro

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

#45

Post by jhanschoo »

d2wa wrote: post #14
andrewaylett wrote: post #2

I've been running at home and at work with first-party isolation enabled for a few months now. Google login works fine for me, as does login with Google. It's broken a few internal tools, especially when people do things like hotlink across internal systems (which would have been broken at least some of the time for most people anyway, until they realise that to view _this_ page properly they need to log in over _the…

I’d appreciate a ‘New Temporary Non-Isolated Window’ for use with websites that don’t work with FPI.

This looks perfect for you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

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

#46

Post by some_account »

kevsim wrote: post #17
some_account wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best strategy is to not use Google however. It's not like you need to in 2018 anymore. There are better services for almost anything out there, although you may have to pay a few dollars for some of them. Well worth it since they are superior to Google. For email, Fastmail is king.

For many people (like me) this is not advice that can followed since many many companies use G Suite.

Use Google in a temporary container (Firefox plugin) and isolate Google completely if you need to use them.

Also you can use startpage.com for searches, it uses Google behind the scenes. Looks nicer too. :)

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

#47

Post by wool_gather »

jstanley wrote: post #38
d2wa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thr…

> the [partial] solution tends to get criticised for the half of the problems it doesn't solve, and the [ineffective] solution doesn't get criticised at all.

It comes out as criticism, and I agree you're right to critique it, but I think it's intended to be persuasion. People completely write off the "solution that solves no problems" and just look for a way to bypass it. If they see a half-solution, they see potential for improvement, and naturally try to realize the potential. But most people aren't very good at being really persuasive; they just see their own point of view and become critical/forceful.

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

#48

Post by Findus23 »

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.

Just FYI: Matomo has nearly none impact to the loading performance as it is always loaded async and deferred (so only after the page has finished loading).

If this is still too slow for you, you could try the official QueuedTracking plugin [1], which tracks into a redis or mysql database and processes the requests afterwards. That way you should get to about 30ms for the request.

[1] https://plugins.matomo.org/QueuedTracking

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

#49

Post by d2wa »

jhanschoo wrote: post #45
d2wa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d appreciate a ‘New Temporary Non-Isolated Window’ for use with websites that don’t work with FPI.

This looks perfect for you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

Introducing another container doesn’t address compatibility problems for websites that absolutely must communicate cross-origin. You can’t disable FPI in just one window, tab, or container.

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

#50

Post by erinnh »

d2wa wrote: post #10
some_account wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best strategy is to not use Google however. It's not like you need to in 2018 anymore. There are better services for almost anything out there, although you may have to pay a few dollars for some of them. Well worth it since they are superior to Google. For email, Fastmail is king.

I use “alternative search engines” daily. However, I have to crawl back to Google if I want to find things that were published in the last two weeks. Even Microsoft Bing can’t keep up with all the content that appears on the web every day.

If its just search engines, you dont exactly have to be logged in to use Google.

Also, there are Google search-proxies like startpage.com

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