101–110 of 416 posts
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They realized it was a risk so they built their own browser to have more control. And it worked. Only now, users are wising up and moving to Firefox.
Is firefox less fingerprintable?
[1]: https://github.com/gautamkrishnar/nothing-private/blob/maste...
Did anyone checked how much data from our data plan cede to advertising? I bet it's 30%-40%.
I have been using uBlock Origin for about three years and I browse the web heavily (4-6 hours/day). In that time it has blocked 13% of requests (10% on mobile). I don't have enough info to quantify the amount of data blocked though.
I have a tweet in my timeline which illustrate this: https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/934474012377444352
I wonder if the top brass at alphabet ever worry that their trillion dollar empire is based on fragile foundations like web audio fingerprinting, etc. that sure would keep me up at night. obviously, i know google does more, but it seems like a large chunk of their revenue must be dependent on shady technical tricks like these working.
They don't have to worry because they control the browser too, and so those tricks will continue to work for the foreseeable future.
Other options would be that if you are a content distribution company, e.g. youtube, google, facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. then you cannot have any control of the client side applications that consume the content. Trustbusting would come into play here.
Or legal obligations to follow a user's desire not to be tracked with real criminal fines and jail time applied to executives, managers, and developers who failed to follow the law.
I just wanted to chime in from Stack Overflow here and let people know: we are aware of the issue. And we're NOT okay with it. We're trying to sort out how to kill the audio behavior now. It's not very straightforward to find where it's coming from, but we are working on it. We've also reached out to Google for their assistance in tracking it down. If anyone can offer advice, we'll more than happily take it. - Nick C…
Are you really aware of the issue? The issue people have here is not the fact that the ad is trying to access the audio api per se but that it is trying to fingerprint the users.
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If websites had to ask permission to enable responsive features like screen size detection, then nobody would use them
Good! Then maybe they'll go back to writing normal html and let my user agent present it to me how I like and how my device best does
I just wanted to chime in from Stack Overflow here and let people know: we are aware of the issue. And we're NOT okay with it. We're trying to sort out how to kill the audio behavior now. It's not very straightforward to find where it's coming from, but we are working on it. We've also reached out to Google for their assistance in tracking it down. If anyone can offer advice, we'll more than happily take it. - Nick C…
The solution is so simple: turn off ads. Seems like you're perfectly okay with this as long as the Satanic ad revenue keeps flowing in.
I just wanted to chime in from Stack Overflow here and let people know: we are aware of the issue. And we're NOT okay with it. We're trying to sort out how to kill the audio behavior now. It's not very straightforward to find where it's coming from, but we are working on it. We've also reached out to Google for their assistance in tracking it down. If anyone can offer advice, we'll more than happily take it. - Nick C…
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I think ad blocking is a misnomer. What people are trying to do when blocking ads is prevent marketing people from spying on them. And the performance and resource consumption that comes from that. Personal opinion: Laws are needed to make what advertisers are doing illegal. Advertisers are spying on people to the extent where if the government did it they'd need a warrant.
I'm doing both. I don't want to be spied on, and there is no room in any sector of my life for corporate propaganda.
Has there been any serious thought / discussion about how the cat and mouse chase of the ads vs ad blockers is going to end? It would be interesting to see where we are in ten years.
I'm hoping in 10 years the world will have figured out that allowing arbitrary Turing-complete code to automatically run on one's personal machine is a terrifically terrible idea, and that the World Wide Web will instead orient itself around something that doesn't make security and privacy extraordinarily difficult to achieve (whether that's still HTML/CSS or something entirely new). At the very least, though, eventu…
Security-wise, I think the best we can hope for is more and more OS-like sandboxing and isolation, capability-based security, and other defense-in-depth measures.
Privacy-wise, for defeating tracking and the like, ideally I'd hope for technical countermeasures to win the battle, but if we do end up having rely on legal measures, they have my full support, GDPR and CCPA included.
(Random idea for a technical countermeasure against fingerprinting: have you heard of those projects trying to defeat behavioral tracking where, whenever you visit a page, it simultaneously opens a bunch of other random pages in the background, hidden from you, and simulates activity on them, the idea being that Facebook has no idea what actual websites you like to visit because it's lost in the noise? What if instead, whenever you visit a page, your browser or a plugin or a proxy or whatever opened the same page simultaneously in a bunch of hidden background windows, with a random configuration of audio enabled/disabled, user agent, screen resolution etc fingerprinted characteristics?)