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Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

windowsreport.com

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Re: Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

#111

Post by solardev »

darkhorse222 wrote: post #102
coldpie wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love if the cookie modals on each site became browser-level They are, in a roundabout way. Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banners and Annoyances filters. The modal gets silently nuked in the background and you can carry on with your browsing. Since you never consented, this ought to be functionally the same as Declining the banner. The Kill Sticky bookmark works similarly, for cr…

As long as someone who does this is prepared to pay for every site they do it on (or forgo the site in the future), since targeted advertising often pays for the site they're visiting. Personally I would like to see ads improved, not removed, as I am unwilling to have 40 different subscriptions to 40 different websites all because every user disabled targeting.

Does the same thing apply to every TV commercial? Are you robbing the producers if you go the bathroom? Or every ad sponsored newspaper or magazine?

I dunno, the website chose to monetize that way. Arguably we don't need so many low quality adspam sites on the web anyway and if most of them died, the signal to noise ratio would get better. Advertising and SEO is a scourge that doesn't need to be protected, IMO. Let them die...

Re: Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

#112

Post by darkhorse222 »

darkhorse222 wrote: post #107
coldpie wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally I would like to see ads improved Sure, sounds good. When you win that fight, let me know and I'll reconsider the ad blocker.

I doubt it. In my experience those that block ads feel entitled to the content without payment of any kind. They see ads as an intrusion rather than a fair exchange. No, I don't see you turning it back on regardless of how things go. The average user doesn't even recognize that running a website literally cost electricity that must be paid for. Who pays for it? Who will carry the boats?

I'm glad you are willing to pay hundreds for that, at least you're consistent. But I think you are out of touch with how most people who use ad blockers think. People want free stuff. They are entitled. And when they have successfully suppressed the much less painful ad experience (no sign up, no credit card, works across all sites) they will be upset when they encounter sign up blocks and ask "why does every website want a subscription?!" not realizing that they themselves did it.

Now there may be some upsides to this. Shock content, designed to garner page views, may become less common. Perhaps content will get longer.

But I do not relish the annoyance of having to pay for every site. I despise that tech help on medium, for example, is often behind a paywall. I'd rather watch an ad.

Re: Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

#113

Post by PittleyDunkin »

ganzuul wrote: post #105
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the entire point of browsewrapped TOS "agreements"? There's a reason why specifically tracking via cookies had to be singled out by regulation to work at all (putting aside how well or not well this actually works).

I doubt it? Stuff only works because we can't punch each other over the internet.

That's a grim view of humanity, I think. The internet is arguably the most collaborative project in the history of mankind especially outside of extractive and invasive motives. Hopefully not all of us will die before seeing serious legislation protecting that kind of social investment.

Re: Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

#114

Post by kube-system »

autoexec wrote: post #110
kube-system wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even better if you have JS disabled by default and sites can't collect 90% of the data points your browser exposes at all. There's two gigantic issues with that: 1. Most websites won't work 2. Most people like websites to work, and so they have JS turned on. If you don't, you'll stick out like a sore thumb.

You'd be surprised at how many websites work just fine with JS disabled, at least in terms of providing the content you want. Menus/navigation might not work, and I wouldn't even attempt online shopping without JS, but enough websites still manage to display basic text and images without JS that it's a surprising annoyance when they fail to. Sticking out like a sore thumb isn't a problem as long as you look like a di…

> Sticking out like a sore thumb isn't a problem as long as you look like a different person's thumb to the next website.

Being consistently unique is okay as long as the tracking party is simply generating programmatic hashes. But if you're always unique, but in a specific way, it doesn't matter. The total amount of entropy matters.

> I wouldn't even attempt online shopping without JS,

So, a nonstarter for basically all normal internet users.

Re: Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

#115

Post by DennisP »

darkhorse222 wrote: post #102
coldpie wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love if the cookie modals on each site became browser-level They are, in a roundabout way. Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banners and Annoyances filters. The modal gets silently nuked in the background and you can carry on with your browsing. Since you never consented, this ought to be functionally the same as Declining the banner. The Kill Sticky bookmark works similarly, for cr…

As long as someone who does this is prepared to pay for every site they do it on (or forgo the site in the future), since targeted advertising often pays for the site they're visiting. Personally I would like to see ads improved, not removed, as I am unwilling to have 40 different subscriptions to 40 different websites all because every user disabled targeting.

I agree that 40 different subscriptions is unreasonable. I use adblockers because I think user-hostile advertising is also unreasonable.

I would happily pay a subscription that gets divided among whatever sites I visit. In the absence of that option, I pay for a subset of sites and freeload the rest. My solution seems ethical to me since if everybody picked a random subset, most sites would get their revenue.

Re: Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

#116

Post by ksec »

coldpie wrote: post #104
darkhorse222 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as someone who does this is prepared to pay for every site they do it on (or forgo the site in the future), since targeted advertising often pays for the site they're visiting. Personally I would like to see ads improved, not removed, as I am unwilling to have 40 different subscriptions to 40 different websites all because every user disabled targeting.

> Personally I would like to see ads improved Sure, sounds good. When you win that fight, let me know and I'll reconsider the ad blocker.

Well at least you agree with the position that Ads is not inherently evil.

Re: Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

#117

Post by mathfailure »

gkoberger wrote: post #67

I was at Mozilla when this was implemented. It was completely optional for websites to support this. A few did at first. A lot of people internally wanted it to be on-by-default, but the argument was that if it was, nobody would respect it – after all, what tracking platform would willingly only track the 0.1% of people who went into the settings to enable it? (Internet Explorer did eventually enable it by default, w…

[flagged]

Re: Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

#118

Post by coldpie »

darkhorse222 wrote: post #112
darkhorse222 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. In my experience those that block ads feel entitled to the content without payment of any kind. They see ads as an intrusion rather than a fair exchange. No, I don't see you turning it back on regardless of how things go. The average user doesn't even recognize that running a website literally cost electricity that must be paid for. Who pays for it? Who will carry the boats?

I'm glad you are willing to pay hundreds for that, at least you're consistent. But I think you are out of touch with how most people who use ad blockers think. People want free stuff. They are entitled. And when they have successfully suppressed the much less painful ad experience (no sign up, no credit card, works across all sites) they will be upset when they encounter sign up blocks and ask "why does every website…

I think fewer people would block ads if they were less miserable. So if you achieve your goal of making ads suck less, fewer people would block ads. I support you in your endeavor! But in the meantime, I'm not going to put up with a garbage web experience just because you asked me to.

Re: Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

#119

Post by gkoberger »

mathfailure wrote: post #117
gkoberger wrote: post #67

I was at Mozilla when this was implemented. It was completely optional for websites to support this. A few did at first. A lot of people internally wanted it to be on-by-default, but the argument was that if it was, nobody would respect it – after all, what tracking platform would willingly only track the 0.1% of people who went into the settings to enable it? (Internet Explorer did eventually enable it by default, w…

[flagged]

I had nothing to do with any of this, but go off I guess.

Re: Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

#120

Post by zamadatix »

elashri wrote: post #16

I understand that many people here have a bad taste of Mozilla's recent actions in many aspects. But the reality here is that this is at worst removing something that almost nobody respected. It was based on honor system and even in Switzerland they do have random inspections for honor system. Browsers never had any enforcement of this feature. And ironically it was used as additional data point of tracking privacy a…

Even more than being ignored it added yet another way to narrow down a fingerprint.
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