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Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#21

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

The downside of all of this is that I feel like sites are now intentionally being designed to break if this kind of stuff is blocked. I used to be able to use Firefox Focus (which has tracking protection built-in) to pay most of my bills. This was convenient because I would just open up the one site in FFF, pay the bill, and then close it, with all browsing history automatically deleted.

In the past month about 3 of my credit card sites stopped working on FFF, as well as my ISP's site. Some would flat out reject the agent ("Your browser is no longer supported"), others would let me log in but then immediately tell me I had been logged out or redirect back to the home page. So now I'm forced to open them back up in regular Firefox, history and tracking included.

It's one thing to say "Don't use sites that exploit your data", but it's not like the average person really has a choice when it comes to paying utility bills.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#24

Post by zelly »

ropiwqefjnpoa wrote: post #4

So, FireFox or Brave? I'm currently using Brave and very happy with it.

If Mozilla had any sense of the future, they would start working on Brave instead of Firefox. Chromium already won on technical reasons. Now someone needs to professionally maintain a privacy fork of it.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#26

Post by metalliqaz »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

The downside of all of this is that I feel like sites are now intentionally being designed to break if this kind of stuff is blocked. I used to be able to use Firefox Focus (which has tracking protection built-in) to pay most of my bills. This was convenient because I would just open up the one site in FFF, pay the bill, and then close it, with all browsing history automatically deleted. In the past month about 3 of…

> The downside of all of this is that I feel like sites are now intentionally being designed to break if this kind of stuff is blocked.

That's fine by me. It's an up-front indication that I don't want to use that service. In the case of bill pay, I would just change my user agent string.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#27

Post by babuskov »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

The downside of all of this is that I feel like sites are now intentionally being designed to break if this kind of stuff is blocked. I used to be able to use Firefox Focus (which has tracking protection built-in) to pay most of my bills. This was convenient because I would just open up the one site in FFF, pay the bill, and then close it, with all browsing history automatically deleted. In the past month about 3 of…

> it's not like the average person really has a choice when it comes to paying utility bills.

You can always use a dedicated browser for that and only that. Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, IE, Chrome, whatever. At least there's enough browsers around to have each dedicated for certain purpose.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#28

Post by purple_ducks »

akerro wrote: post #18
MikusR wrote: post #13

Do they include also the google analytics that are built into firefox addons page?

No, these cannot be skipped without external request blocking, like on DNS level. Even µblock won't block GA built-in in Firefox.

uMatrix defaults to blocking GA and indeed blocks the request for analytics.js on that page.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#29

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

The downside of all of this is that I feel like sites are now intentionally being designed to break if this kind of stuff is blocked. I used to be able to use Firefox Focus (which has tracking protection built-in) to pay most of my bills. This was convenient because I would just open up the one site in FFF, pay the bill, and then close it, with all browsing history automatically deleted. In the past month about 3 of…

The more I protect my personal data (hi, GDPR!), the more websites are adding recaptacha to all their pages.

Blocking trackers makes Google suspicious, so they're adding more and more recaptcha challenges to let me pass their tests, sometimes 5 to 10 in a row. I'm now working for Google's IA for free just to be able to make purchases online, access some services that I already paid for, or filling in support request forms (sometimes it's for websites operated by local communities and funded by tax payers).

I have absolutely no control over what Google does with all my recaptcha inputs, it could be to build a fleet of autonomous cars (that could end up killing the public transportation in my city), or improving an algorithms that helps drones identify targets during a social unrest (could be a future me).

Just because I want my privacy rights to be respected to the minimum (just don't track me for political/advertising purposes), I have to spend several minutes of my day working for Google and help them make money on advertising and sell AI to governments.

How dystopian.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#30

Post by dmortin »

zimbatm wrote: post #12
dajonker wrote: post #2

I see one risk for Firefox: if they block all trackers, e.g. Google Analytics, then it would appear to people viewing browser statistics in Google Analytics that no-one is using Firefox, and thus the developers will be told they don't need to test anything on Firefox.

Or just actively punishing Firefox because blocking tracking is also blocking ads, which is their revenue model. Why spend money optimizing for a browser that doesn't generate revenue? If Firefox becomes the bastion of privacy sensitive people it will become more and more like Tor users, all tainted with the same labels. I mean it's already the case that recaptcha will more likely trigger on Firefox than Chrome, aski…

> Why spend money optimizing for a browser that doesn't generate revenue?

Maybe sites will move to a model that you'll be offered to pay for their services if you block trackers. So you'll have a choice of paying with your data or paying with your money.

Either way someone has to foot the bill at the end. I guess in this case most users will let trackers work instead of paying.

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