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

ctrl.blog

51–60 of 120 posts

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

#52
post #37

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.

Google has already been fined billions of euros by the EU, and is currently being investigated by the EU for lying about not tracking people.

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

#53
post #13
post #8

I guess trackers will just ask websites to route analytics traffic through their own infrastructure. Would it be enough for example.com to setup a dns alias pointing tracking.example.com to tracking.com?

This would be already a giant leap forward: Usually, there is not a lot of trust between actors, and there doesn't need to be: everyone gets their own tracking pixel and is happy, who cares if user data is leaked along the way. The setup you describe requires more trust beetween parties, and, as a side-effect, reduces the overall number of potential contractual partners which get access to user data. It also reduces…

Right. It's historically been very assymetric - the content sites are risking their user's safety by working with shady as providers, but not their own.

Under a server-side include, the content company is just as at risk from malicious adscript as the client.

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

#54
post #50
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Startpage and the like don’t get everything you find on Google. E.g. you can find today’s articles from even the most obscure blogs on Google. Searching for the same article won’t return that result on Startpage until at least a few weeks from now. I’m not sure if this is Google holding back on the good stuff, or if it’s Startpage not being willing to pay a higher fee.

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

#56
post #50
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

http://duckduckgoose.com/

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

#57
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.

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

Lets just say their best-practices was last updated sometime in the early 2000s. It’s 2018 and their client-side tracker is synchronously executed and holds up the entire page.

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

#58
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…

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.

Native advertising trying to pretend its journalism by association is a much bigger problem than display advertising. Websites informing you about “great deals” with the voice normally reserved for actual journalistic endeavors (or even opinion pieces) in between their normal articles isn’t in any way desirable. Even big publishers don’t come clean about when articles are ads or not.

E.g. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/pcmag-vpn-review

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

#59
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Native advertising trying to pretend its journalism by association is a much bigger problem than display advertising. Websites informing you about “great deals” with the voice normally reserved for actual journalistic endeavors (or even opinion pieces) in between their normal articles isn’t in any way desirable. Even big publishers don’t come clean about when articles are ads or not. E.g. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/…

That's completely orthogonal to what is being suggested.
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