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Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

blog.mozilla.org

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141–150 of 246 posts

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#141

Post by bravoetch »

jimmaswell wrote: post #104
JohnFen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. Not if that targeting is done using data gathered about me without my consent -- as it almost universally is. Targeting based on context (what sort of website the ad is on, for instance), is fine.

I don't understand this new position (that GDPR follows) that consent is required for information to be gathered on someone. If someone sees me wearing a blue shirt and writes in their notebook that I wore a blue shirt then I don't feel like I have some inherent right to coerce them to erase it or prevent them from selling that information to Blue Shirt Emporium.

If they wrote 'person wearing blue shirt', fine. But if they followed you home, took note of the address, cross referenced that to find your name and other personal info, then stored all that data to a company that decides who gets loans based on shirt color - not fine. Etc.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#143

Post by vkou »

fxbl0i wrote: post #107
_hl_ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give some examples of things they do that you disagree with? I can't really think of any controversial non-firefox things they've done.

Controversial != useless. I don't like they wasted money on Firefox OS or Persona; I don't want to donate to them if my money goes there instead of to Firefox. In fact, why not let us decide where exactly our money will go if we donate?

Mozilla invested into Firefox OS, because they were hoping to disentangle their #1 revenue stream from ad-tech companies.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#144

Post by walterstucco »

manigandham wrote: post #136
JohnFen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the same thing here. I disagree completely.

Why?

Because they are not standing outside, they are inside my shoes, clothes and even underwear

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#145

Post by tinus_hn »

jacekm wrote: post #68
charlesdaniels wrote: post #59

I agree with the general sentiment in the comments that this is good -- fingerprinting in particular is something browser vendors should be trying to combat. I am concerned about the approach however; a simple blacklist of fingerprinting scripts may be insufficient, in that non-blocked scripts can still access the data that is used to accomplish fingerprinting. Personally, I would like to see more security around the…

> like to see more security around the data that is used for fingerprinting, such as user agent I think this is already available, just not enabled by default. In about:config one need to set privacy.resistFingerprinting to true. (be aware however that this setting causes problems with google captcha - the number of challenges that you will need to solve will drastically increase)

If it becomes the default Google can’t get away with bullying people using recaptcha.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#146

Post by darkpuma »

ogre_codes wrote: post #96
darkpuma wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Untargeted advertising is very often more egregious than merely telling people a product exists. Traditional pre-digital advertising runs the gamete from "Come to me and I'll fix your car" to "You are ugly and unpopular, but you can fix that by drinking our caramel colored sugar water." Advertising that tries to induce then exploit self esteem issues is a plague.

This little bit of misdirection Google and Facebook have propagated about how much better the advertising you get with tracking is the slimiest piece of bait-and-switch in history. Seeing people repeat it like it's fact is testament to just how insidious it is. Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. So advertisements you get are even sleazier than non-targeted…

> "So advertisements you get are even sleazier than non-targeted advertising"

On average yes. Just as there is a gradient in non-targeted advertising of 'basically benign' to 'scum of the earth', I think there is a gradient in targeted advertising too.

On the basically benign end of the gradient you have the "You recently bought book X from author Y, perhaps you'd be interested in Book Z from author Y." (I don't like that stuff, I still block it, but it doesn't quite get me incensed if you know what I mean.) But the potential for harm from targetted ads can be truly extreme.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#147

Post by darkpuma »

mindcrime wrote: post #126
ogre_codes wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This little bit of misdirection Google and Facebook have propagated about how much better the advertising you get with tracking is the slimiest piece of bait-and-switch in history. Seeing people repeat it like it's fact is testament to just how insidious it is. Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. So advertisements you get are even sleazier than non-targeted…

Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. Showing you an ad for something you don't want, can't use, and would never buy, benefits nobody.

> "Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. "

That's incredibly naive. You've failed to consider the wide class of products which are tempting but harmful.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#148

Post by darkpuma »

arthur_pryor wrote: post #120
darkpuma wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Untargeted advertising is very often more egregious than merely telling people a product exists. Traditional pre-digital advertising runs the gamete from "Come to me and I'll fix your car" to "You are ugly and unpopular, but you can fix that by drinking our caramel colored sugar water." Advertising that tries to induce then exploit self esteem issues is a plague.

and... targeted advertising doesn't use these attack vectors? really?

Of course it does. I never suggested otherwise.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#149

Post by fwip »

manigandham wrote: post #114

This endless war could be solved with a single meeting with the 3 major adtech companies. All browsers have to do is share a single advertiser ID and have it reset by the user whenever they want. No more cookies, pixel syncs, or fingerprinting and all the related countermeasures. This is the exact mechanism used by mobile apps right now so it's already well-tested and proven to work.

Why would advertisers stop using the existing, better methods?

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#150

Post by the-pigeon »

Spare_account wrote: post #92
pinko wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't they just allow the user to whitelist recaptcha?

The people who're trying to avoid being fingerprinted are probably thinking of Google when they decided to go down this path. I'm willing to go through extensive captcha cycles if that's the cost of retaining some anonymity. I installed uMatrix a while back to recover some anonymity and it worked at first, my Captcha load spiked significantly which was a great indication that I'd succeeded but it has dropped over tim…

At this point can I just pay for a certificate or something?

Like for $1 give me a certificate that I can use to say "I'm not a spammer" and I can anonymously buy as many certificates as I want.

And then if a certificate is used by a spammer it becomes invalid. Seems like it's expensive enough to be worth using for existing spammers but let normal people pay a $1 every year or two to not have to deal with captchas.

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