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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#501

Post by daxelrod »

elzbardico wrote: post #386
bityard wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use checks because in the US there are certain things you can't use a credit card for, e.g. loan payments. I pay contractors with checks because almost none accept credit cards and cash gets cumbersome once you start getting into 4 and 5 digits. My local utilities all charge a "convenience fee" of a few dollars when paying online or with a credit card. Sending a check in the mail costs me only $0.50. (Even th…

Can't you use a wire-transfer or an ACH transfer? All those use cases are easily solved with electronic transactions in most of Europe, Asia and even in Latin American countries like brazil. They are usually inexpensive or free and instantaneous.

In the US, wire transfers can incur fees for both sender and recipient. ACH is more often used by medium to large businesses transferring money from or to consumers, but the ergonomics are pretty bad for one-off person to person transfers, to the point that if you hire a plumber who owns their own business, they'll probably accept check, and sometimes accept credit cards.

The US does have some electronic networks for instant, no-cost p2p payments. https://www.zellepay.com/ has a large number of participating major banks with some major exceptions. A lot of people use https://venmo.com/ or https://cash.app/ which are not directly integrated with banks but then offer electronic transfer of funds to bank accounts.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#502

Post by aembleton »

nudpiedo wrote: post #290
ogre_codes wrote: post #48

These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already. Of cours…

Blocking ads and installing some sort of cookie auto-accepter/deleter[1] is the best and mopst optimization saver which you can have without disabling javascript. [1] https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

Or just add the filter list [1] to uBlock Origin

1. https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#503

Post by dang »

beervirus wrote: post #2

Firefox is so good. It's a continual source of amazement for me that a majority of HNers are using a browser made by the largest data gobbler in the world, instead of one that actually tries to prevent spying on users.

> a majority of HNers are using a browser made by

How do you know what browser the majority of HNers are using?

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#504

Post by at-fates-hands »

mstade wrote: post #199
makecheck wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern ad networks are essentially the “fax machine flyers” of old: someone you don’t know using your resources and your time, denying you use of your own resources temporarily, to send you something you don’t want. Except now it’s like every “normal” fax page includes 15,000 flyers.

I wonder how many people reading this comment are thinking, "what's a fax machine?" :o) I like the analogy, but I wonder how effective it is on anyone under the age of what, 35?

A small business owner I used to work for got sued for fax blasting people when the marketing company he hired was sending out some 2K faxes per day to unsuspecting business owners.

I still laugh about how he got several cease and desist letters and still continued sending the same businesses stuff.

Ahhhhhhh yeah, the good old days.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#507

Post by passivate »

jamiequint wrote: post #437
makecheck wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern ad networks are essentially the “fax machine flyers” of old: someone you don’t know using your resources and your time, denying you use of your own resources temporarily, to send you something you don’t want. Except now it’s like every “normal” fax page includes 15,000 flyers.

This is a terrible analogy. Nobody forced you to go to the website that voluntarily decided to include the trackers.

It is still not a nice thing to do. Can we at-least agree on that?

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#508

Post by xg15 »

masa331 wrote: post #429
simias wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the root of all evil here is Javascript being opt-out instead of opt-in (and effectively mandatory for a big chunk of the internet these days). Letting any website and their friends (and the friends of their friends) run turing complete code on the client PC probably sounded reasonable when the web was created but it seems incredibly naive in hindsight. It's not as bad as ActiveX and other plugins, but it's…

No no no. The problem isn't JavaScript or web capabilities here. It's the companies and people who use them in evil ways. I would rather handle that even if it's much much harder.

And how would you address this problem?

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#509

Post by LeifCarrotson »

danbruc wrote: post #452

How much money is a user actually worth per year on average? And why can I not pay that amount of money and be left alone, not seeing any ads, not being tracked, not being sold?

Annual average revenue per (active) user (from North America) is about $180 for Google, $150 for Facebook, and $80 for Twitter. As you might expect, Amazon has far higher revenue per user ($700), and Apple is about $140, but they're both more like $30 when you only count their advertising revenue instead of much lower-margin retail and hardware manufacturing businesses.

Searching for "ARPU" news will give articles with new takes every time anyone publishes new quarterly numbers, but those are roughly accurate. Obviously, they can be distorted to tell whatever story you want by messing with market segmentation, time period, and what kind of revenue/profit/margin/expenses/capital you want to invoke, but those are rough numbers.

To be clear, those are first-party advertising companies, this isn't the value of a page view to a random blog with side-roll ads from some third-party advertisers/trackers. I have no idea what Taboola/Outbrain chumboxes generate other than that they both have $1B revenue and there are about 5B Internet users worldwide, which means the average user is worth $0.20 per year to them. And it's reasonable to assume the majority of their revenue comes from wealthy English speaking adults, so maybe your demographic is worth $5 or something like that.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#510

Post by CogitoCogito »

xg15 wrote: post #508
masa331 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no no. The problem isn't JavaScript or web capabilities here. It's the companies and people who use them in evil ways. I would rather handle that even if it's much much harder.

And how would you address this problem?

Regulation seems appropriate.
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