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Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

blog.mozilla.org

121–130 of 209 posts

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#121
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for recommending Buster (author here), but I think the right solution is to encourage people to stand up against Google's abuse, especially because they are working on making reCAPTCHA even more pervasive an inescapable. The recommended way of integrating reCAPTCHA v3 is to load it on every page of your site, not just on pages with forms. Given the popularity of this service, reCAPTCHA v3 is set to become a br…

What is the rationale for recommending reCAPTCHA on every page of a site??

So that they can watch your interactions with the site to confirm that you do it in a “normal” way, nevermind that this discriminates against those with disabilities.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#122
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, these cannot be skipped without external request blocking, like on DNS level. Even µblock won't block GA built-in in Firefox.

uMatrix defaults to blocking GA and indeed blocks the request for analytics.js on that page.

Really? I thought no extensions are permitted to run on that page.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#123
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the past month about 3 of my credit card sites stopped working on FFF, as well as my ISP's site. Which sites are these? When you make claims like this, you should specifically name the businesses that do this, so the rest of us can try to avoid them.

I avoided doing so because I don't really want the internet to know what credit cards I have. With that said, let's say I specifically name "Chase". Are you going to cancel your existing Chase bank account or credit card upon hearing this?

>With that said, let's say I specifically name "Chase". Are you going to cancel your existing Chase bank account or credit card upon hearing this?

Well put it this way: if you specifically name "Chase", I'm going to think twice about applying for a credit card there or opening a bank account there. It's harder when you're already invested in a business, but when someone is shopping for a new one, when they hear credible information that shows that business to be a bad actor or that it will provide them a bad experience, it's pretty easy to cause many of them to choose something else.

BTW, I would never advise anyone to get a Chase bank account; they're pretty well-known to be horrible. You can get far better service and interest rates from a good online bank like Ally, Schwab, Discover, etc.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#124
post #75
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked up some DevOps stuff on reddit through a proxy with adblockers in private mode and all of a sudden my front page was filled with posts about depression, men asking advice about how to talk to women, and advice about getting a job and moving out of your parents house. These were based on sessions cookies, but I was still kinda offended it pegged me as a sad loser just because I wanted to know more about NGINX…

There is almost no action you can take on Youtube without it recommending a deluge of god-awful 'user generated content' videos on these topics. The only solution is to frequently right click and select "Not Interested" and then "Not interested in the channel: [channel name]". The recs are poor enough that I don't mind blanket-banning an entire channel from my feed. Youtubers so frequently "compete" by using clickbai…

Another solution - block the recommendations altogether. On PC, you can use specialized extension, or just Stylus (the latter works especially well with old Youtube layout). On Android, use NewPipe[0] or Youtube Vanced[1]. On iOS, perhaps Ivory[2] will do. Or at least delete your watch & search history[3], so the recommendations will be related only to the video you are currently watching.

If you are subscribed to enough good channels, you won't notice anything aside of suddenly having much more free time. And whenever you're bored, unlock recommendations for a while to learn about new channels (I do it once every few months).

[0] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

[1] https://vanced.app/ , beware of scam sites

[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivory-video-player/id129434748...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/feed/history (on old YT layout)

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#125
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the past month about 3 of my credit card sites stopped working on FFF, as well as my ISP's site. Which sites are these? When you make claims like this, you should specifically name the businesses that do this, so the rest of us can try to avoid them.

I avoided doing so because I don't really want the internet to know what credit cards I have. With that said, let's say I specifically name "Chase". Are you going to cancel your existing Chase bank account or credit card upon hearing this?

The principal here is that businesses with bad practices should be named and shamed. Companies that act like this are banking on their consumers not caring enough to do anything about it. Even a negative press reaction may be enough to dissuade companies from doing this. Refusing to name the companies is compliance.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#126
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I avoided doing so because I don't really want the internet to know what credit cards I have. With that said, let's say I specifically name "Chase". Are you going to cancel your existing Chase bank account or credit card upon hearing this?

>With that said, let's say I specifically name "Chase". Are you going to cancel your existing Chase bank account or credit card upon hearing this? Well put it this way: if you specifically name "Chase", I'm going to think twice about applying for a credit card there or opening a bank account there. It's harder when you're already invested in a business, but when someone is shopping for a new one, when they hear credi…

> BTW, I would never advise anyone to get a Chase bank account; they're pretty well-known to be horrible. You can get far better service and interest rates from a good online bank like Ally, Schwab, Discover, etc.

Again, it was a placeholder name. But I'll be honest for the sake of those curious and just say "the credit card that's offered through Costco" :)

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#127

The downside of all of this is that I feel like sites are now intentionally being designed to break if this kind of stuff is blocked. I used to be able to use Firefox Focus (which has tracking protection built-in) to pay most of my bills. This was convenient because I would just open up the one site in FFF, pay the bill, and then close it, with all browsing history automatically deleted. In the past month about 3 of…

The more I protect my personal data (hi, GDPR!), the more websites are adding recaptacha to all their pages. Blocking trackers makes Google suspicious, so they're adding more and more recaptcha challenges to let me pass their tests, sometimes 5 to 10 in a row. I'm now working for Google's IA for free just to be able to make purchases online, access some services that I already paid for, or filling in support request…

does anyone have a script to keep triggering captchas and then providing[flood] the most wrong, and disruptive answer possible until ?

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not like the average person really has a choice when it comes to paying utility bills. You can always use a dedicated browser for that and only that. Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, IE, Chrome, whatever. At least there's enough browsers around to have each dedicated for certain purpose.

Well, that's the thing: Firefox Focus was my dedicated browser for that purpose. So now that's really no longer an option. I guess I can use Chrome in Incognito mode, but god knows how long it will be before payment sites start blacklisting that, too.

Temporary tab containers are a great alternative to a dedicated browser or incognito mode.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#129
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for recommending Buster (author here), but I think the right solution is to encourage people to stand up against Google's abuse, especially because they are working on making reCAPTCHA even more pervasive an inescapable. The recommended way of integrating reCAPTCHA v3 is to load it on every page of your site, not just on pages with forms. Given the popularity of this service, reCAPTCHA v3 is set to become a br…

What is the rationale for recommending reCAPTCHA on every page of a site??

They want to monitor your behavior (mouse movements, clicks, etc) site-wide so they can determine whether you're a bot before you get to the "protected" page. So the carrot for the website owner is that people that don't want to solve "click all the stop signs in these 9 pictures" challenges don't abandon your forms because they're never challenged, at the expense of adding behavioral tracking site-wide.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#130
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a risk for using Google Analytics to me. If your analytics suite isn’t representative of your site’s traffic and users, maybe you should look for a more ethical platform/solution?

Are there more ethical platforms that don't get blocked by default for Firefox users?

Yes! There are many options!

Log parsing is an option. There are self hosted options. There are also services like https://simpleanalytics.com/ (I have not used them or know much about them tbh).

Personally, on my recent projects I start without analytics. If I want to measure health or growth, I define my own "metrics" and use sql or logs to generate. I don't need to know what country you are in. I don't need to know what browser you are using. If I do need to know something, I can look at useragents. If it truly is for user benefit and not just my curiosity, I can actually ask my users with a survey.

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