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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

#101

Post by abdullahkhalids »

MichaelGG wrote: post #100
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It takes about 10 lines of boilerplate css to turn soup into something readable. Which you can then modify via JS as much as you want.

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

#102

Post by clarry »

MichaelGG wrote: post #99
clarry wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not telling what people should or should not do. I'm just saying that they are ruining the experience for me by trying to shove unwanted apps down my throat when the thing that really matters is the text and images which can and traditionally have been done just fine without upstream apps. There is nothing for me in the "modern web", I don't want it if it doesn't help me. The web is not an end, it's a means.

So when people show their work (implicitly asking for critique), I think it is perfectly appropriate critique to point out if the static content (information) that matters cannot be displayed without Javascript. You don't need to run an UI on the server for me. No, you don't need to hack up rendering for me. My browser renders things itself. I want the browser to render things for me, according to my preferences. I don't need your rendering. My browser is my UI. Just give me the content in the right format so it can present it for me, with the interface that I am accustomed to and in charge of.

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

#103

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

chimeracoder wrote: post #69
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…

> 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? Don't worry, there's a startup that's "fixing" that[0]. Nomi uses the MAC address of your phone to identify the brick-and-mortar venues you visit. It's opt- out for co…

Luckily there's a simple solution to that: randomized MAC addresses. My laptop assigns itself a random MAC address on boot. About the only downside is that some captive portals require me to re-sign-in on boot.

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

#104

Post by bitJericho »

sliverstorm wrote: post #95
nitrogen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't seen many physical stores tracking license plates in a similar fashion.

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

#105

Post by miahi »

pessimizer wrote: post #97
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…

>Do you wear an ID around your neck? Yeah; it's called my face.

Can I follow you anywhere and photograph/record you doing everything? This is usually called stalking and it's illegal, unless it's done by the government, when it's called protecting from terrorists.

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

#106

Post by pessimizer »

miahi wrote: post #105
pessimizer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you wear an ID around your neck? Yeah; it's called my face.

Can I follow you anywhere and photograph/record you doing everything? This is usually called stalking and it's illegal, unless it's done by the government, when it's called protecting from terrorists.

I agree with you 100%. There's no technical solution.

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

#107

Post by jasomill »

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #103
chimeracoder wrote: post #69

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? Don't worry, there's a startup that's "fixing" that[0]. Nomi uses the MAC address of your phone to identify the brick-and-mortar venues you visit. It's opt- out for co…

Luckily there's a simple solution to that: randomized MAC addresses. My laptop assigns itself a random MAC address on boot. About the only downside is that some captive portals require me to re-sign-in on boot.

Another downside on some (private) networks is that it breaks MAC-based DHCP reservations.

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

#108

Post by thirsteh »

zupa-hu wrote: post #72
zupa-hu wrote: post #71

The Do Not Track movement says Do Not Make Money. The entire movement is pissing against the wind. Tracking is how these companies make money. This is their motivation system. A "low" of current online physics is "tracking makes money". As such, it's a waste of energy. Change physics first.

By the way, many people make valuable content and support their work by ads. Ads are online currency. I am not using adblock because it is like stealing their work without paying.

Not if you never click on ads anyway.

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

#109

Post by prodigal_erik »

MichaelGG wrote: post #99
clarry wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Incompetent and control-freak authors are making applications that do nothing more than force one bizarre rendering of their documents. We were naive enough to provide tooling to make that feasible, and now it's become a platform which is displacing the World-Wide Web of open hypertext which could be repurposed.

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

#110

Post by samstave »

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…

If you're in a car, yes you do. A license plate - and these scanners are all over the place.
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