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Firefox expands fingerprint protections

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#131

Post by abdullahkhalids »

recursive4 wrote: post #93
y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #14

I exclusively use private browsing, but I know that doesn't do much in preventing tracking, so it's nice to see this finally starting to roll out. The fact that I have to go to great lengths to browse anonymously - and companies desperately try to circumvent my genuine decision to opt out of their tracking - tells me everything I need to know about those companies. Words like sleezy, shady, and predatory come to mind…

Out of curiousity, how would you steelman the argument that fingerprinting is no different than a store owner, standing behind the counter, taking note of the faces of who enters his store, and maintaining a log?

Lots of moral values/legal rules are based on magnitudes and scale.

You can talk at a normal voice inside your own home at night, and even if the neighbor can hear you through the thin walls, they have no legal recourse. If you start blasting music, the police will (in principle) come and stop you.

Some things are okay in moderation and simply bad in excess.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#132

Post by treetalker »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #124
dpoloncsak wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't your (proverbial) Costco membership card track every time you enter and leave the store? Doesn't seem like anyone is suing them... Also, if they were logging you specifically, you may have grounds to stand on. But if they're logging every customer that comes in/out (like websites do), I think there is a lot less grounds for a restraining order or anything Edit: Found out I'm using 'proverbial' wrong but I thi…

> Doesn't your (proverbial) Costco membership card track every time you enter and leave the store No (you have to use it at the register for Costco to know you were there), and they don't track your every movement in store either, and they don't track your every movement outside the store either, and there isn't a standard way to say "I don't want this" which they nonetheless choose to ignore.

> No (you have to use it at the register for Costco to know you were there),

Not the case where I am: Costco scans everyone's card upon entry into the store.

> and they don't track your every movement in store either,

It might: Costco certainly uses security cameras, and it's possible that Costco may be using some sort of AI / facial recognition software alongside the cameras. Perhaps someone who has worked with Costco in security / loss prevention could chime in.

> and they don't track your every movement outside the store either,

Probably true, although who knows whether Costco purchases data about its members from brokers?

> and there isn't a standard way to say "I don't want this" which they nonetheless choose to ignore.

I think you're talking about the equivalent of cookies in the real world, in which case I'd generally agree.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#133

Post by hmry »

evertedsphere wrote: post #80
unethical_ban wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be a happy middle between "no protection" and "complete uniqueness" The web without ad blocking is revolting. Browsers building in these features makes them more popular. Aside: Fuck the Washington Post. They have a line in their privacy policy that acknowledges the existence of "Do Not Track" flags in browsers. Their acknowledgement: since there is no industry standard for responding to it, they ignore…

wow lmao > Do Not Track. Some web browsers may transmit a “do-not-track” signal. Because there currently is no industry standard concerning how to treat such signals, the Services currently do not take action in response to do not track signals. We respond to legally recognized browser-based opt out signals such as the Global Privacy Control signal for California residents. https://www.washingtonpost.com/privacy-poli…

Read: we ignore it because it's not legally enforced

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#134

Post by hmry »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #100

This seem sto be the actual list of things it's protecting? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-protection-agai... They are... surprising to me. And as a developer, some of them seem kind of horrible. Altering canvas data, really?

It's a real "can't have nice things" situation.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#135

Post by kube-system »

godelski wrote: post #126
kube-system wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably weren't tracking you, that was probably a case of directing a user toward a supported browser for customer support purposes. I would imagine that was a requirement in somebody's Jira ticket, solved with a few lines of code. By contrast, tracking people on the web is a multibillion dollar industry, and there are out of the box commercial libraries that do very sophisticated tracking. None of these soluti…

The announcement came with the claim about DRM. So I believe there was some "legal" issue about it. I'm also sure they didn't actually care that much. > By contrast, tracking people on the web is a multibillion dollar industry Of which Netflix is a part of. > The vast majority of websites by count are not doing anything sophisticated. But some are. And this is my point. Somewhere like fingerprint.com is trying to use…

Yes, there are plugins (e.g. widevine) that do DRM and they have/had varying browser/os compatibility.

But ultimately, Netflix is just trying to check a box in their contractual obligations, and/or prevent high-schoolers with chrome dev tools from sending movies to all their friends. They're not really interested in spending large sums of money to figure out your browsing history. It's just not relevant to their revenue stream.

>> tracking people on the web is a multibillion dollar industry

> Of which Netflix is a part of.

I was referring to businesses that do web activity tracking as their primary business. Facebook and Google's primary business is advertising, which isn't the same thing, and they control enough products that they don't actually have to do very much fingerprinting in order to target ads effectively. Most of their data, people voluntarily hand over. I was getting more at the big ecosystem of commercial tools that others can implement that do these sorts of things. e.g fingerprint.com and many others.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#136

Post by Spunkie »

nicce wrote: post #57

Unfortunately, Cloudflare and other protections will keep working even less than they used to. I have started to not use Cloudflare protected websites because they don’t work with Firefox. But that is a fight I am going to lose.

I run exclusively Firefox over known mullvad VPN endpoints and I never have any issues with cloudflare or its captcha.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#137

Post by DANmode »

floxy wrote: post #79
y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #14

I exclusively use private browsing, but I know that doesn't do much in preventing tracking, so it's nice to see this finally starting to roll out. The fact that I have to go to great lengths to browse anonymously - and companies desperately try to circumvent my genuine decision to opt out of their tracking - tells me everything I need to know about those companies. Words like sleezy, shady, and predatory come to mind…

Tor? Although I wish there was a way to make a reddit account.

Library

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#138

Post by baranul »

godelski wrote: post #98
rogueparitybit wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently switched from Containerise + Temporary Containers to Auto Containers. Brand new addon, but the dev is responsive and IMO it works much better for creating new containers on the fly as you browse. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-containe... https://github.com/Shajirr/FF-Auto-Containers

That's really handy! I like that it handles domains automatically Edit: Seems to break ad blocking and there's some issues with login. Such as adding a container for YouTube requires also doing *.google.com since that's how the login is handled. Interesting and I'll keep playing around with it

Usually, with most browsers, you can't separate YouTube from Google in order to watch their videos. People can get around this using NewPipe and various forks, that are mostly for Android. There is also FreeTube for the desktop, that doesn't allow ads, but does connect to Google.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#139

Post by DANmode »

recursive4 wrote: post #93
y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #14

I exclusively use private browsing, but I know that doesn't do much in preventing tracking, so it's nice to see this finally starting to roll out. The fact that I have to go to great lengths to browse anonymously - and companies desperately try to circumvent my genuine decision to opt out of their tracking - tells me everything I need to know about those companies. Words like sleezy, shady, and predatory come to mind…

Out of curiousity, how would you steelman the argument that fingerprinting is no different than a store owner, standing behind the counter, taking note of the faces of who enters his store, and maintaining a log?

Value of the dataset to attackers/buyers.

Re: Firefox expands fingerprint protections

#140

Post by nicce »

harshreality wrote: post #71
nicce wrote: post #57

Unfortunately, Cloudflare and other protections will keep working even less than they used to. I have started to not use Cloudflare protected websites because they don’t work with Firefox. But that is a fight I am going to lose.

Symptoms? Is it limited to when a site has Cloudflare's more aggressive protection turned on? I haven't noticed any problems I've attributed to Cloudflare, and I use Firefox exclusively.

The only symptom is that captcha never completes.

I have more restrictive protections on. If you use just loose settings, it completes, but advanced fingerprint protection, for example, breaks captcha completion.

This is very known issue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35742606

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