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Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

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Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#91

Post by notastartup »

tech-no-logical wrote: post #26
r0h1n wrote: post #14

AdBlock Plus once blocked Google ads, till Google decided to pay them [0] to "whitelist" their ads by default. The cynical part of me sees this as a precursor for AdBlock to sign a deal with Facebook and let their ads/tracking through too, for a price of course. [0] http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/5/4496852/adblock-plus-eye-go...

just use adblock edge : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

and of course, it can't be installed on chrome.

almost makes me want to switch to firefox completely and use adblock-edge.

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#92

Post by nitrogen »

bitJericho wrote: post #82
spindritf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you wear an ID around your neck? Do you walk into an establishment, introduce yourself, tell the keeper where you came from, when was the last time you visited, check in with an inter-business tracking device, and then ask them to forget all that? This is what a browser with (or more appropriately, on) DNT is doing. Long way from camouflage. And offline, we should also employ techniques like randomizing MAC addres…

I don't think that's particularly fair. The browser shows where you are coming from, similar to you walking from one store that sent you to a second store. The browser's identifying marks are more like the color and type of your vehicle. The ID around your neck? That really is more like a company that would use facial recognition, or tagging your phone and tracking that. What websites do is exactly what the parent de…

Browser fingerprints are largely unique, so it's far more identifying than just the color of your car.

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#93

Post by 13throwaway »

coldpie wrote: post #53
hnha wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but silent tracking in the background does not seem obstructive by their definition.

Well, it is AdBlock, not TrackingBlock. There are other extensions out there to help with that problem. Popular ones are NoScript (which improves the web in many more ways, as well) and Ghostery.

Or use the easyprivacy list. https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#94

Post by 13throwaway »

notastartup wrote: post #91
tech-no-logical wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just use adblock edge : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

and of course, it can't be installed on chrome. almost makes me want to switch to firefox completely and use adblock-edge.

If you are trying to avoid being tracked by Google I don't recommend using Chrome.

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#95

Post by sliverstorm »

nitrogen wrote: post #92
bitJericho wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's particularly fair. The browser shows where you are coming from, similar to you walking from one store that sent you to a second store. The browser's identifying marks are more like the color and type of your vehicle. The ID around your neck? That really is more like a company that would use facial recognition, or tagging your phone and tracking that. What websites do is exactly what the parent de…

Browser fingerprints are largely unique, so it's far more identifying than just the color of your car.

They are unique the same way your gender + birthdate + zip code are unique. That is to say, a combination of ordinary parameters that make it unique, and only identifiable if you go to the trouble to do something with the information.

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#96

Post by [deleted] »

nitrogen wrote: post #92
bitJericho wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's particularly fair. The browser shows where you are coming from, similar to you walking from one store that sent you to a second store. The browser's identifying marks are more like the color and type of your vehicle. The ID around your neck? That really is more like a company that would use facial recognition, or tagging your phone and tracking that. What websites do is exactly what the parent de…

Browser fingerprints are largely unique, so it's far more identifying than just the color of your car.

[deleted]

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#97

Post by pessimizer »

spindritf wrote: post #49
ben0x539 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also walk around town completely uncamouflaged, voluntarily displaying my uniquely identifiable face and whatnot, and yet somehow most businesses can still restrain themselves and do not follow me around, colluding to enable each other to videotape my every step for analytics purpose. Sure, there's some technical steps that can be taken but there's also a social or cultural dimension to what behavior is popularly a…

Do you wear an ID around your neck? Do you walk into an establishment, introduce yourself, tell the keeper where you came from, when was the last time you visited, check in with an inter-business tracking device, and then ask them to forget all that? This is what a browser with (or more appropriately, on) DNT is doing. Long way from camouflage. And offline, we should also employ techniques like randomizing MAC addres…

>Do you wear an ID around your neck?

Yeah; it's called my face.

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#98

Post by pyre »

spindritf wrote: post #49
ben0x539 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also walk around town completely uncamouflaged, voluntarily displaying my uniquely identifiable face and whatnot, and yet somehow most businesses can still restrain themselves and do not follow me around, colluding to enable each other to videotape my every step for analytics purpose. Sure, there's some technical steps that can be taken but there's also a social or cultural dimension to what behavior is popularly a…

Do you wear an ID around your neck? Do you walk into an establishment, introduce yourself, tell the keeper where you came from, when was the last time you visited, check in with an inter-business tracking device, and then ask them to forget all that? This is what a browser with (or more appropriately, on) DNT is doing. Long way from camouflage. And offline, we should also employ techniques like randomizing MAC addres…

> Do you walk into an establishment, introduce yourself, tell the keeper where you came from, when was the last time you visited, check in with an inter-business tracking device, and then ask them to forget all that?

If the shopkeeper kept a logbook that recorded all of that, and then he published said logbook to other companies, you might feel that this was going a bit further than the social contract between you and the shopkeeper allows.

Though not a perfect analogy, the shopkeeper and you having small talk -- without anyone writing things and keeping the records forever -- would be tantamount to the server keeping the values in a transient fashion (i.e. for the duration of the request or session and then dropping them).

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#99

Post by MichaelGG »

clarry wrote: post #86
freehunter wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It IS "doesn't work due to noscript". Browsers come with Javascript. Websites use Javascript. The owner of the site wrote the site using Javascript because browsers support Javascript by default. You specifically turned off Javascript, even though it's a default part of the web. You broke your experience. If you turn off your car's engine and the brakes and steering stop working, that's not the engine's fault, it's y…

I don't want to use these browsers. I don't want to run these scripts. I want text, sometimes images, maybe a video. If you are serving scripts instead of the thing I'm there for, you are hurting my browsing experience. You are trying to assume control over my browser and my browsing habits. Noscript can help my browsing experience in some cases, but not always. It's giving me back some control.

Sounds like you want to read documents, not use applications that people are making. That's fine, but it's not the modern web, not by a long shot. It's fine if you don't want to execute someone's app, but don't act as if it's some higher ground.

Why should anyone spend time rewriting their entire UI to run on a server and hack up rendering for you because you don't wish to run their UI code?

Re: Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

#100

Post by MichaelGG »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #83
freehunter wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It IS "doesn't work due to noscript". Browsers come with Javascript. Websites use Javascript. The owner of the site wrote the site using Javascript because browsers support Javascript by default. You specifically turned off Javascript, even though it's a default part of the web. You broke your experience. If you turn off your car's engine and the brakes and steering stop working, that's not the engine's fault, it's y…

I do remember a few years ago when everyone in web development talked about how your website has to degrade gracefully in the absence of some technology (JS, flash etc). Now nobody cares. I come across sites that won't even show me the text unless I allow fonts.googleapis.com (via RequestPolicy). The general point being the most websites I visit I am just reading text. Yet, I usually have to allow a few secondary dom…

A few years ago there may have been a fair amount of users that legitimately didn't have capabilities to display such pages. Now they don't, so why spend a lot of time or change front-end development to accommodate a tiny number of users?
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