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Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

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Re: Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

#141

How do you prevent Iframes from communicating their cookies to the parent window? Using window.postMessage? Disable all cookies for iframes? That seems like it would break the internet.

If you're the parent, you can use the `sandbox` attribute on the frame. If you're the child, you can use the `frame-ancestors` CSP directive.

Re: Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

#142

Why now, as opposed to several years ago? Are there downsides to blocking 3rd party trackers by default, and if so, what has changed recently to allow this to happen now?

I have 3rd party cookie blocking on Chrome.

Honestly the two things I've noticed are: - I have to fill out recaptcha. A lot. - I've been applying for jobs, some companies have a button for linked in auto fill. Sometimes this works sometimes it doesn't

Beyond that there's a few other thing like, wikidot, that don't really work. In this case the cookie is given by wikidot for sign in, then you're redirected to the custom url wikidot instance (Scp foundation in this case) and you're just not logged in until you allow cookies in this case.

Re: Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

#143

Do you use server side visitor tracking on your projects? This will probably if not already shift analytics more to the backend.

I'm using a self-hosted instance of Countly for a new project. It's been great so far. Still client-side, but since you host it, the domain isn't blacklisted.

Re: Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

#144
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I migrated to uMatrix because it allows me to block cookies, media, javascript, and xhr by default. It replaced several different privacy extensions with a single control panel. You can set the defaults to be as strict or lenient as you wish.

>I migrated to uMatrix because it allows me to block cookies, media, javascript, and xhr by default. It replaced several different privacy extensions with a single control panel. You can set the defaults to be as strict or lenient as you wish. That's a lot of configuration to do. I'd rather just use Firefox containers, noscript, and use Tor for things I don't want tied to my ad profile.

"by default"

It's not a lot of config at all. If the site breaks, you click a button and unblock some stuff. Otherwise the defaults work great.

Re: Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can first-party cookies used to track users across multiple properties?

You send tracking events to your analytics/tracking partner from your backend instead of from the browser and they combine the cookie ids.

I assume they'd only combine them on "soft factors" (browser fingerprints, IPs etc) then?

Since the unique IDs between the different platforms would differ for the same user (as there's no way to coordinate without 3rd party cookies)

Re: Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. Let them yell, allow the system to break. I'm not convinced that the current status quo of paying for services via targetted advertising that amounts to quite a severe level of manipulation and tracking is tenable (nor desirable). Figure out something better. The alternative is what we do now: a select group with tech savvy blocks advertisements, and lets the masses pick up the bill by 'accepting' ads and havin…

> Figure out something better. There is no magical solution. The alternative is some kind of payment system. And many people can't afford paying for each site they visit, so it would limit people's access to the net if there were paywalls everywhere. Also, if sites can't show ads and not enough people subscribes then many sites will close which would lead to further concentration of the web. Small players would be el…

If people can't afford paying, then it follows that they can't afford being advertised at in order to stimulate their consumption beyond what they actually need. If the answer to that is that people are of course in their right to ignore advertisements (as if that is possible), then by extension blocking them outright is morally defensible as well, and we are right back to where we are now.

Either that, or on-line advertising is not nearly as effective as advertisers think it is, and they are just subsidising the whole shebang while the Facebooks and Googles profit.

As for journalism: yes, that is tricky. Personally, I'm subscribed to one national quality newspaper (NRC in the Netherlands) as my main source of news and research journalism, and just today I've set up an annual subscription for €12 with the Guardian, which I visit occasionally as it is one of the few reliable British sources for news on the whole Brexit ordeal.

Ideally, I would pay a monthly flat fee that I can distribute at the end of each month to participating websites I've visited, but such a system would have to be fair to both the consumers and the publishing websites. If it just ends up a system with yet another FAANG-like Silicon Valley middleman that takes a 30% cut I'm not interested.

Re: Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and they combine the cookie ids. And how do they do that? The "advantage" of third-party tracking is that a cookie set by the analytics service on site A gets sent back when the user goes to site B and C and D (etc). Without that, they have to somehow figure out that user 34 on site A is the same as user 95 on site B. That's often possible, but much less reliable.

I assumed the grandparent meant how do "you" track across your own properties.. For the likes of google and co, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more ad companies requiring you to send some other PII via the api so they can turn a random tracking ID into an email address or whatever though. The same user on a.com and b.com get different ID's, but a.com and b.com both send data to tracker.com which maps that…

No, I meant across different properties of different publishers. I assume that's still only possible with browser fingerprinting, IPs etc.

So blocking third-party cookies is a good start to avoid tracking across different publishers (which is the big no-no for me, the fact that a single publisher knows what i read of his is not such a big issue and not that different to what has always been done by just crawling the ht_access logs...)

Re: Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

#148

My work laptop is a very fast upper end macbook and I can somewhat reliably run Firefox on that. My personal laptop is an older macbook pro retina model and whenever I use firefox on that it gets incredibly slow and from time to time the computer just freezes for 20-40 seconds. So, sadly, I can't use firefox on that. At one point someone on HN posted a link to the bug report on mozilla's bug tracker about this issue…

Is this it? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

Yes that seems to be it! Thank you. Always good to not be alone when experiencing such problems.

Re: Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

#149

My work laptop is a very fast upper end macbook and I can somewhat reliably run Firefox on that. My personal laptop is an older macbook pro retina model and whenever I use firefox on that it gets incredibly slow and from time to time the computer just freezes for 20-40 seconds. So, sadly, I can't use firefox on that. At one point someone on HN posted a link to the bug report on mozilla's bug tracker about this issue…

I've got a bottom of the line 2013 macbook air. I closed everything down earlier to update to mojave, and firefox told me it would close 7 windows and 71 tabs. Never had a problem with it. My main desktop is an ubuntu 16.04 machine with 16GB of memory and I've never had a slowdown, often get upto the 100+ tab range across different windows.

The MacBook Air doesn’t have a retina screen, it appears to be related to that. I also use ff on Ubuntu without issues.

Re: Firefox to Block All 3rd Party Trackers by Default

#150

My work laptop is a very fast upper end macbook and I can somewhat reliably run Firefox on that. My personal laptop is an older macbook pro retina model and whenever I use firefox on that it gets incredibly slow and from time to time the computer just freezes for 20-40 seconds. So, sadly, I can't use firefox on that. At one point someone on HN posted a link to the bug report on mozilla's bug tracker about this issue…

I have an old Thinkpad X220 and i see no slowdown with Firefox, but I do see more CPU usage in my cpu graphs compared with Chromium so I worry when I am on battery power. I'm not sure how to properly compare CPU usage to determine if I am just imagining it.
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