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Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#331

Post by simias »

fencepost wrote: post #233
simias wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would too, but clearly most people wouldn't, otherwise advertisement wouldn't be such a popular way to monetize apps and websites (and Google wouldn't be the behemoth that it is today). Actually I would also gladly pay for a decent search engine but even DuckDuckGo decided to monetize using ads, which IMO means that sooner or later if they're successful enough they'll become just as bad as the rest. Besides paying…

A possibly relevant distinction for DDG ads is that (I believe) they're anonymized and tied only to the search, not to your identity.

You're right but I can't shake the feeling that if they ever become really popular the temptation to change that model will be huge. Maybe the DDG of today is principled enough not to do that (and it's also probably in their best interest at the moment since their most obvious feature compared to other big search engines is its privacy) but what about 10 years from now? Or 20 years? What happens if their growth starts stalling and the shareholders ask for more? Will they take the side of their freeloading users over the paying advertisers and investors? Principles tend to be soluble in a high-enough concentration of dollar bills.

After all there was a time where most of us trusted Google and their "Do No Evil" motto. And then eventually in morphed into "Do More Profit" and we have the corporation that we know today.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#332

Post by ChrisSD »

sfink wrote: post #210
ChrisSD wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if HN users do want to try to lessen that percentage here's the donation page: https://donate.mozilla.org/

I believe that money goes to the Mozilla Foundation, which uses it on the initiatives you can see at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/initiatives/ Although the Foundation wholly owns the Corporation (we call them MoFo and MoCo internally), money donated to MoFo does not go towards paying MoCo employee salaries as far as I am aware.

Is that not because Firefox currently pays for itself (via Google search revenue)? If the idea is to change that equation, there's surely no reason why money couldn't flow the other way?

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#333

Post by securityfreak »

vidyesh wrote: post #203
securityfreak wrote: post #84

All of this is fantastic. I just hope the day comes, when Google is no longer the default search engine in Firefox. Safari is my default browser, but I use Firefox heavily for “social” media accounts. I love the extensions.

You can change the default to any other search engine you want. Just a few clicks away.

Yes, that is true. But the hypocrisy is how Firefox criticises Google (either directly or indirectly), but is paid by Google to have them as the default search engine. The emphasis is on the word default, not that you can't change it. The same thing goes for Apple with Safari. They disabled 3rd party cookies and promote privacy, but Google is still the default browser, for which Google pays a very large amount of money each year.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#334

Post by m_sahaf »

anonymfus wrote: post #289
maxheadroom wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention Edge moving to the Chrome base; which further disenfranchises anyone from making sure it works in 'x' browser, anymore. " It works in Chrome and Edge, which is based on Chrome, so what's your problem, again? "

Well considering that Google already specifically blocks Chromium based Edge from its current YouTube version may be Recaptcha will not work in it soon too.

Not true.... https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1123993553070448651?s=20

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#335

Post by user32556 »

kakkksaknmdm wrote: post #321

I worked in the ad industry. Every web-browser including brave, tor,safari is uniquely identifiable even on same hardware. All the public computer researchers and browser vendors are years behind the techniques to fingerprint devices (probably 5+). Canvas, WebGl etc are techniques of the past. There are much more advanced ones, than can identify devices with completely uniquely (on both desktop and mobile) Also we kn…

Are you talking about CSS-based fingerprinting?

https://browserleaks.com/css#explanation

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#336

Post by vxNsr »

As much as I hate more legislation I think the only way to solve this is to make it very onerous to own and compile this data and to level heavy fines (as in criminal charges and/or force the company into bankruptcy via 90% revenue fines) in cases when the database is breached.

Everything else will just turn into an arms race between those who don't wanna be tracked and those who wanna track.

If the US did something like the GDPR but in our constitution I wouldn't be surprised if a cottage industry opened up overnight in secure data-warehousing. I get that it would complicate things for small companies but we brought this on ourselves.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#337

Post by rum3 »

tragicpapercut wrote: post #319
yc12340 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with Tor. Cloudflare frequently blacklists entire countries/counties worth of people (and rarely reverts those blacklists). There is a good chance, that you have missed a lot Indian/Vietnamese/Russian/Chinese visitors, because Cloudflare concluded, that forwarding their traffic to your site isn't financially viable for them. > Unfortunately there isn't a "block Tor traffic from assholes" option…

And for companies that don't do business with those countries - this is not a loss. Most "asshole" traffic I see falls into one of two categories - attempts to exploit vulnerabilities (../../../etc/passwd stuff) and account takeover attacks. The first I can forgive, I don't frankly care where that traffic comes from and the responsibility is entirely mine as website admin to prevent these types of attacks through goo…

One simple solution I can think of is to restrict POST requests from Tor exit nodes while still allowing GET requests. Cloudflare will give you a impossible-to-solve captcha even if you just try to visit site.com/index.html and I see no reason for this.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#338

Post by t0astbread »

How does this work? Does it just block domains known to host fingerprinting scripts? If no, how does it hide addons and settings that interfere with the website? And how does it prevent leaking information by itself that can assist fingerprinting?

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#339

Post by TeMPOraL »

kakkksaknmdm wrote: post #321

I worked in the ad industry. Every web-browser including brave, tor,safari is uniquely identifiable even on same hardware. All the public computer researchers and browser vendors are years behind the techniques to fingerprint devices (probably 5+). Canvas, WebGl etc are techniques of the past. There are much more advanced ones, than can identify devices with completely uniquely (on both desktop and mobile) Also we kn…

As a service to the public, could you please share the state-of-the-art techniques used currently by the industry?

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#340

Post by oops »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #144
clairity wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wonder why mozilla hasn't tried a premium pricing model? the premium version of firefox could have a yearly subscription of, say, $24. it would have all privacy features turned on, the best privacy addons installed, and all analytics/telemetry turned off, by default. i would even pay a whole $3/month for that! =D

The brand risk of having firefox associated with the free version would be horrendous. To have a premium product, you need to have a non-premium product, and given that most users would use the non-premium product, firefox would quickly become associated with a browser that has the actually desirable features turned off... Which would probably be even worse than their low market take up at the moment (and I am typing…

I agree. Maybe they could differentiate the two versions with a badge or some adornment in the UI which appears grayed out in the “free” edition. I guess it’s the same as asking for donations but maybe not as blatant. Also not sure why they stopped selling merch. I would buy some right now.
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