Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 304 posts

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#11

Post by throwaway425 »

Karunamon wrote: post #8
throwaway425 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a valid objection. GA at this point is on most websites you visit. The data is forwarded to Google where it's processed and stored forever. GA is one of the biggest threats to privacy on the web, and any company claiming to care about your privacy should not be using it.

I find it very, very hard to get outraged over analytics code on a web browser site. And as previously mentioned every time someone brings up this idiotic factoid, Mozilla's use of GA isn't exactly standard.

You find it very, very hard to get outraged because you either use GA yourself and do not wish to acknowledge your complicity in the matter or you've simply failed to make the obvious leap from analytics to clickstream data.

Google wants to know what web pages you visit, when, and how often, and a GA beacon that phones home that information placed on every web page is the easiest way for them to do it.

EDIT: there are either a lot of angry GA users in this thread or Google apologists. Either was, I do believe Google is now or will soon use GA for clickstream tracking. I also believe this is why they offer to host frequently requested assets like JQuery.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#12

Post by hobarrera »

kozukumi wrote: post #4

For those wondering what Firefox tracking protection is - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-fir... From my, very quick, tests it appears to work quite well as a poor man's adblocker as well. Nice!

It seems that their protection is based on Disconnect. Does that mean I can get the same level of protection with this feature instead of using Disconnect?

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#14

Post by throwaway425 »

callahad wrote: post #7
throwaway425 wrote: post #2

I justed visited https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/ and browsed the source, and they still have the Google Analytics tracking crap on their website. Strange for a company that claims to be "committed to your privacy."

Mozilla has an enterprise agreement with Google that limits what data is collected through GA and how it can be used. Quote: Our Google Analytics premium account is set to opt-out on all of 3rd party uses of the data and the only people who have access to the anonymous aggregated data is Mozilla Employees. This is not the normal Google Analytics setup that most people use on other websites. Also, to increase privacy…

If it's on Google's servers, then clearly Mozilla employees aren't the only ones with access to it, and the anonymization he's referring to is mere IP address anonymization, where the last octet of an IPv4 address is zeroed. The viability of browser fingerprinting as demonstrated by the EFF's Panopticlick shows cookies, cross-domain or otherwise, are no longer the only viable means to persistently tracking users.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#15

Post by bobajeff »

I would love for Mozilla to find other means of funding online content besides advertising. In either case I'd love to see them take a hard stance on privacy and against tracking.

They should block trackers that have no effect on website features and restrict and monitor the ones that do effect features.

...and this is another reason Mozilla needs to have their own search engine. They could have much greater influence on these this things if they had the ability to punish bad behaving websites.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#16

Post by hobarrera »

chippy wrote: post #10
stockholmsin wrote: post #9

How does this compare to something like Privacy Badger[1]? I haven't done any benchmarking, but if it causes similar slowdowns, it isn't bothersome and the benefits are definitely worth it. [1] https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

I'd also like a comparison with ublock and/or ghostery. It appears that this becomes enabled after the blocking plugins.

ublock is more about ads, and this is tracking.

While they usually come hand in hand, Facebook ads (eg: while on facebook) don't add additional tracking.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#17

Post by aroch »

bobajeff wrote: post #15

I would love for Mozilla to find other means of funding online content besides advertising. In either case I'd love to see them take a hard stance on privacy and against tracking. They should block trackers that have no effect on website features and restrict and monitor the ones that do effect features. ...and this is another reason Mozilla needs to have their own search engine. They could have much greater influenc…

Apple is supposedly getting into the search engine business. It'd be great if they and Mozilla got together, both companies believe in user privacy and could complement each other in getting things down

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#18

Post by higherpurpose »

> Advertising does not make content free. It merely externalizes the costs in a way that incentivizes malicious or incompetent players to build things like Superfish, infect 1 in 20 machines with ad injection malware, and create sites that require unsafe plugins and take twice as many resources to load, quite expensive in terms of bandwidth, power, and stability.

That's a good point. Reminds me of "coal energy is cheap"...except for the millions of people it's killing or the billions of dollars paid in healthcare costs. And that's without mentioning coal is usually heavily subsidized by taxpayer money.

In the same way advertising that's more and more focused on monitoring everything you do or say online (thanks to all the companies that don't want to enable end-to-end encryption in their IM's - Google, Microsoft, etc) is causing a lot of harm as well.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#19

Post by bsder »

aroch wrote: post #17
bobajeff wrote: post #15

I would love for Mozilla to find other means of funding online content besides advertising. In either case I'd love to see them take a hard stance on privacy and against tracking. They should block trackers that have no effect on website features and restrict and monitor the ones that do effect features. ...and this is another reason Mozilla needs to have their own search engine. They could have much greater influenc…

Apple is supposedly getting into the search engine business. It'd be great if they and Mozilla got together, both companies believe in user privacy and could complement each other in getting things down

Apple believes in user privacy.

Your naïveté is touching.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#20

Post by throwawayaway »

throwaway425 wrote: post #14
callahad wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla has an enterprise agreement with Google that limits what data is collected through GA and how it can be used. Quote: Our Google Analytics premium account is set to opt-out on all of 3rd party uses of the data and the only people who have access to the anonymous aggregated data is Mozilla Employees. This is not the normal Google Analytics setup that most people use on other websites. Also, to increase privacy…

If it's on Google's servers, then clearly Mozilla employees aren't the only ones with access to it, and the anonymization he's referring to is mere IP address anonymization, where the last octet of an IPv4 address is zeroed. The viability of browser fingerprinting as demonstrated by the EFF's Panopticlick shows cookies, cross-domain or otherwise, are no longer the only viable means to persistently tracking users.

Google obviously have systems in place to allow employee access for absolute emergencies - but alarmed in case of unauthorised access.

in any case, the analytics data is anonymised and as such cannot be used to identify you. google goes to huge lengths anonymising data to aggregate you as a user into groups of millions for advertisers to bid on, you are simply not a big enough fish for special treatment.

edit: an explanation for downvoting is customary.

Post reply on HN