Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users
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Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users
#2Interesting. I also think that the browser signature, together with IP address, will probably come very close to uniquely identifying users.
Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users
#3Who is able to get access to my browser history? I thought it was just my ISP/VPN, which can obviously track me better in other ways.
Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users
#4Who is able to get access to my browser history? I thought it was just my ISP/VPN, which can obviously track me better in other ways.
Consider for example, that many pages use remotely loaded resources.
I would think things like Facebook/Twitter like buttons or Google Fonts might make it to assemble this history. Sites like FB are said to maintain "Shadow Profiles" of people, even when those people aren't using their service directly.
I suppose in theory any sufficiently shared infrastructures such as AWS/Cloudflare could do so as well, but they are disincentivized to do so.
Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users
#5Who is able to get access to my browser history? I thought it was just my ISP/VPN, which can obviously track me better in other ways.
extensions with the necessary permissions I think would be one obvious source.
Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users
#6So can DNS queries.
Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users
#7Who is able to get access to my browser history? I thought it was just my ISP/VPN, which can obviously track me better in other ways.
Malicious extensions are a likely culprit. This is the ultimate irony of the whole WebExtensions debacle; browser vendors wanted to stop the extensions from interacting with the browser because maintaining that interface is work, so now the most trivial extensions will request full access to all websites so they can inject scripts. To bring back "backspace navigates back" I have an extension that needs just that.
Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users
#8Who is able to get access to my browser history? I thought it was just my ISP/VPN, which can obviously track me better in other ways.
Malicious extensions are a likely culprit. This is the ultimate irony of the whole WebExtensions debacle; browser vendors wanted to stop the extensions from interacting with the browser because maintaining that interface is work, so now the most trivial extensions will request full access to all websites so they can inject scripts. To bring back "backspace navigates back" I have an extension that needs just that.
Needing javascript that embeds in every page for basic mouse and keyboard behaviour is insane. No clue why they decided it should be the only viable option.
Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users
#9Who is able to get access to my browser history? I thought it was just my ISP/VPN, which can obviously track me better in other ways.
Facebook. Their embedded like buttons are all over the damn internet.
Google Analytics.
Google Fonts.
Javascript CDNs.
Image CDNs. Imgix.
CDNs in general. Akamai. Cloudflare.
Any of the several ads platforms.
Disqus, or any of the commenting platforms.
Youtube. Lots of people embed their video content.
AWS, Google Cloud, Azure.
Every time you visit a page that has an embedded content from a remote host, that host knows you visited that page.
Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users
#10Who is able to get access to my browser history? I thought it was just my ISP/VPN, which can obviously track me better in other ways.
Malicious extensions are a likely culprit. This is the ultimate irony of the whole WebExtensions debacle; browser vendors wanted to stop the extensions from interacting with the browser because maintaining that interface is work, so now the most trivial extensions will request full access to all websites so they can inject scripts. To bring back "backspace navigates back" I have an extension that needs just that.
I am very much used to alt+left arrow to navigate back, in the unlikely case you were not aware of this shortcut and if you would like to drop this extension for whatever reason.