Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center • Hacker News Board

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#131

Post by notatoad » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

svnpenn wrote: post #43

Honestly its getting out of hand. I have everything blocked I can think of [1], and even browsing in private mode, I still sometimes get the "recommended for you" on YouTube. Stop invading my privacy. [1] https://cup.github.io/rosso/youtube

Just because a site says something is recommended for you, doesn't mean it's actually a personalized recommendation. If a site has a recommedation box, they're going to fill it with something. They might be making that recommendation off a lot of data, or they might be making the recommedation off no data other than "people tend to click things when we label them as personalized recommendations".

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#132

Post by NotASithLord » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

dajonker wrote: post #8

bn7t wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website owners can just use the user agent in weblogs to determine this.

Yes they can. But in my experience, at big organizations, the people using Google Analytics are not developers and will have no idea what weblogs are or how they could use them to determine the real browser statistics.

I'm a dev and I have no idea what weblogs have to do with this discussion. Quick search didn't do anything to clue me in either.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#133

Post by Vinnl » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

kgwxd wrote: post #50

lprd wrote: post #25

This is great! On another note, I'm wondering when I can remove uBlock Origin?

Don't, ever. There's no reason to trust Mozilla will keep this up forever. They're not even close to doing what uBO does. Blockers are best kept as a third-party solution with no conflict of interest. If too many people stop using uBO because the FF built in tools are "good enough", eventually we'll loose proper extension support and we will be at the mercy of browser vendors again.

What's Mozilla's conflict of interest?

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#134

Post by mindslight » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

floatboth wrote: post #94

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

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…

That particular example is just extremely odd because… well, the business model of the utilities whose bills you pay (nor the bank's) shouldn't be based on advertising?? Maybe it's just a pile of web development fail, using 3rd party cookies for no good reason..

Likely they've been sold a bunch of snake oil to prevent "fraud" based around sniffing up their customers' asses.

But you should still use all of the anti-surveillance tech you can, lest the downward spiral continue. The methods are implemented gradually, with soft heuristics. The more customers they have without such vulnerabilities, the harder it is to justify turning the screws.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#135

Post by Vinnl » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

floatboth wrote: post #100

zelly wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript engine optimization Devtools Every benchmark: https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/overview?numDays=365 Anecdotally, Firefox uses a lot more CPU, memory, and battery. Makes sense since the JS engine is so much worse. In this era the browser is just a VM for JavaScript.

For CSS, Firefox devtools are far, far ahead of everything else. JS debugging was a bit behind Chrome, but it should be on par now, except maybe in performance tracing.

Firefox has pretty good performance tools now: https://profiler.firefox.com/

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#136

Post by skinkestek » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #118

magduf wrote: 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?

> I avoided doing so because I don't really want the internet to know what credit cards I have.

And that is one of the reasons why we are allowed to have multiple accounts on this site, as long as they aren't all throwaways.

I bet you are aware of this already, so I'm mentioning this mostly for the benefit of those who haven't wasted half a decade (or more in my case here.)

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#137

Post by badrequest » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

uoaei wrote: post #96

ric2b wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because blocking tracking is also blocking ads It's not, the Internet is the only medium where it's assumed that tracking/targeting is necessary for advertising. TV, Magazines, radio, podcasts, cinema don't track users.

Well, they do, but only in aggregate and pretty indirectly: surveys, focus groups, requests for feedback, etc.

Which are leagues more imprecise than the internet alternative.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#138

Post by fzzzy » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

Kaiyou wrote: post #82

Meanwhile, Firefox won't selectively delete hundreds of cookies, despite all the options indicating that it would be possible. Instead, it hangs and fails to delete selected cookies.

I mean, that's a bug. File a bug, or see if you can fix it yourself, since you can repro it.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#139

Post by harterrt » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

floatboth wrote: post #94

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

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…

That particular example is just extremely odd because… well, the business model of the utilities whose bills you pay (nor the bank's) shouldn't be based on advertising?? Maybe it's just a pile of web development fail, using 3rd party cookies for no good reason..

Utilities shouldn't need advertising in theory, but utilities don't behave well (economically speaking) in general. There is to much regulation (limiting upside from selling their services means squeezing money out of less ethical verticals) or there are monopolistic incentives (you don't have a choice, so we can make you give us ad revenue)

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#140

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #68

chmod775 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosted analytics like Matomo for instance. https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo

Which do get blocked since they're still trackers. The protection isn't just against 3rd party trackers. And if you obfuscate your Matomo client script to get around the user's preference for trackers you're not being very ethical.

> And if you obfuscate your Matomo client script to get around the user's preference for trackers you're not being very ethical.

I'm not sure I agree, but you made interesting point and I'm glad you brought it up!

Personally, I don't think I would classify that as unethical. Ethics need to be looked at with intent in mind, and if you are comfortable being honest about what you are doing, I _think_ I would be okay with this. Not sure, though–I do have doubt.