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NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

washingtonpost.com

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Re: NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

#101

Post by JohnTHaller »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #91
Smerity wrote: post #7

There are two primary issues here: the prevalence of Google Analytics and the unencrypted nature of the majority of websites. Google Analytics is on a substantial proportion of the Internet. 65% of the top 10k sites, 63.9% of the top 100k, and 50.5% of the top million[1]. My own partial results from a research project I'm doing using Common Crawl estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far…

Why do we still have referrers? They don't allow us to do anything that we wouldn't be able to do without them. If Mozilla and Google made a statement today saying, "We'll be removing referrers from cross site requests in 6 months time for Chrome and Firefox.", the tiny tiny proportion of sites that are using them for real functionality will have plenty of time to update. Of course, as a web developer, it's useful to…

For lots of us using basic CDN services, we enable referrer checks to ensure that folks aren't hotlinking images or direct linking downloads from other sites. These CDNs allow basic blocking based on referrers. You usually set it to only permit when there is a referrer from your own domain as well as blank referrers (if the CDN supports it) since most privacy conscious folks will disable referrer rather than fake it. We don't actually care that you don't provide a referrer, we just don't want other sites using our images in their own pages (leeching our bandwidth we pay for) or direct linking to binary downloads (bypassing our site with our advertising or revenue possibilities or branding but using our bandwidth).

Re: NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

#103

Post by driverdan »

sehugg wrote: post #2

Interesting choice of cookie: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/28/the-google-cookie-tha... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=368255

> On Firefox, the cookie shows up automatically as part of Safe Browsing, unless a user disables “third party” cookies.

Disable 3rd party cookies. It solves a lot of these types of tracking issues.

Re: NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

#104

Post by driverdan »

bottled_poe wrote: post #10

In my opinion, browsers should block all third party website content by default. Yeah, I know, the interwebs will break if they actually did this. Well perhaps someone should come up with some kind of website quality rating which indicates that a site can be viewed withing worrying about the prying eyes of FaceBook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Disabling 3rd party cookies works just fine. I've been doing it for years.

Re: NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

#105

Post by j_s »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #91
Smerity wrote: post #7

There are two primary issues here: the prevalence of Google Analytics and the unencrypted nature of the majority of websites. Google Analytics is on a substantial proportion of the Internet. 65% of the top 10k sites, 63.9% of the top 100k, and 50.5% of the top million[1]. My own partial results from a research project I'm doing using Common Crawl estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far…

Why do we still have referrers? They don't allow us to do anything that we wouldn't be able to do without them. If Mozilla and Google made a statement today saying, "We'll be removing referrers from cross site requests in 6 months time for Chrome and Firefox.", the tiny tiny proportion of sites that are using them for real functionality will have plenty of time to update. Of course, as a web developer, it's useful to…

Google is already killing referrer on search results (by redirecting), to force people to pay for Analytics

Re: NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

#106

Post by aroch »

quesera wrote: post #92
fixanoid wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, hai Brian! Aren't you a former doubleclick-turn-righteous? And don't you also employ an ex-NSA dude? And no, we do not sell user data, just tracker data. Cheers!

I get that you two are rivals, but he does have a point that you haven't addressed. Ghostery seems to be in the business of selling the data that I forget to tell them they may not collect. This is intrinsically a sneaky thing to do. Yes I know about and use the "default to blocking" setting, but I don't think there is much argument that Ghostery users download your software with the expectation that the default woul…

You have to opt-in to 'Ghostrank' which is the data that they sell. I don't really see what's sneaky about this. Hell,if you click the 'see more...' toggle on the prefs page it tells you what Ghostrank does.

>Online marketing companies need better visibility into real-world applications of their technologies and those owned by their competitors. GhostRank data is sold as reports to businesses to help them market to consumers more transparently, better manage their web properties, and comply with privacy standards.

Re: NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

#107

Post by aroch »

quesera wrote: post #93
andrewcooke wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

folks please don't downvote people when they're giving useful info. there is a button in the advanced section that makes blocking work by default on new data. that's useful to know - i've just enabled it, and you should too. just because you don't like someone (likely based on one comment on a web site...) doesn't mean that they should be downvoted...

I didn't downvote him, but I can understand why others might. His comment seems willfully ignorant of the problem, which is that Ghostery calls itself a tracker-blocker, but squirrels that obviously-desirable config option away under "advanced" settings. If Ghostery was on our side, really and truly, that would be the default. Indeed, it probably wouldn't even be an option. Of course when the tracker list is updated,…

> His comment seems willfully ignorant of the problem, which is that Ghostery calls itself a tracker-blocker, but squirrels that obviously-desirable config option away under "advanced" settings.

Err, the option under Advanced just lets you set it to auto-block new elements as they're added. When you first install Ghostery, the walk through lets you pick that option as well without having to be "advanced" (oo, scare quotes!) in your preference setting.

Re: NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

#108

Post by gorhill »

anonymous123941 wrote: post #99
gorhill wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about either... https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/How-does-HTT...

Could you include RequestPolicy in your comparison please? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...

I tested what is available on Chromium. Request Policy is not available for this platform.

Re: NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

#109

Post by ceejayoz »

j_s wrote: post #105
mike-cardwell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we still have referrers? They don't allow us to do anything that we wouldn't be able to do without them. If Mozilla and Google made a statement today saying, "We'll be removing referrers from cross site requests in 6 months time for Chrome and Firefox.", the tiny tiny proportion of sites that are using them for real functionality will have plenty of time to update. Of course, as a web developer, it's useful to…

Google is already killing referrer on search results (by redirecting), to force people to pay for Analytics

I'd pay for an intermediate level of GA in a heartbeat.

Right now, once you hit 10M pageviews a month you either have to sample or pay $150k/year for Premium.

I don't need support, an account manager, four-hour turnaround on data, an SLA, etc. I just need more pageviews sometimes.

Re: NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

#110

Post by andrenotgiant »

j_s wrote: post #105
mike-cardwell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we still have referrers? They don't allow us to do anything that we wouldn't be able to do without them. If Mozilla and Google made a statement today saying, "We'll be removing referrers from cross site requests in 6 months time for Chrome and Firefox.", the tiny tiny proportion of sites that are using them for real functionality will have plenty of time to update. Of course, as a web developer, it's useful to…

Google is already killing referrer on search results (by redirecting), to force people to pay for Analytics

What? That is not true. Paying for the Google Analytic premium products gets you no additional data on referrer or search terms.

AdWords paid search clicks still send the info, if that's what you're talking about.

But this discussion is on completely removing referrers, not just stripping search keyword.

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