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Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#161

Post by mindcrime »

ogre_codes wrote: post #138
mindcrime wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. Showing you an ad for something you don't want, can't use, and would never buy, benefits nobody.

Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. This is nonsense. History is littered with cases of advertising abuse and misuse. Everything from literal snake oil salesmen to modern day shysters profiting from selling conspiracy theories and anti-tax bullshit is enabled and propagated by advertising.

OK, fair enough, I should have specified that I meant outside of the case of obvious fraud (eg, snake-oil).

Also, FYI, I'm not the one who down-voted you. In fact, have an upvote to counter-balance that.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#162

Post by mindcrime »

gnud wrote: post #133
mindcrime wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. Showing you an ad for something you don't want, can't use, and would never buy, benefits nobody.

Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer. If the ad results in the viewer getting an eating disorder, for example, that's fine for the advertiser if it also results in a sale.

Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer.

If it resulted in a sale, then that means by definition it helped me find a product or service I wanted. If I made a bad decision in making that purchase, that's an orthogonal issue.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#163

Post by Aeolun »

dahfizz wrote: post #81
theseatoms wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how powerful a paid browser could become on this front. As people slowly become more privacy-aware this might be feasible.

I have a hard time believing a paid browser would ever get big. People just do not care enough.

If Jetbrains were to build a browser on top of firefox with a similar level of features to their IDE’s, I would absolutely pay for that.

Developer tools is already invaluable, but there’s no reason it cannot be better.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#164

Post by mindcrime »

ogre_codes wrote: post #139
gnud wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer. If the ad results in the viewer getting an eating disorder, for example, that's fine for the advertiser if it also results in a sale.

Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer. Exactly this. Often it doesn't even require a sale. A lot of Facebook & Google advertising is for bullshit sites which push increasingly sketchy content backed by even sketchier advertising. Sometimes the goal isn't even profit, the Russians paid for advertising to influence politics.

That's fair, and I should have been more specific in saying that I'm not referring to cases of outright fraud. What I mean is this:

If I an a potential buyer of, say, a book... and my interests include AI, multi-agent systems, and operating systems, then an ad for Barnes & Noble offering the new title OS Development for AI and Multi-Agent Systems is probably going to be mutually beneficial, because it will help me find a book I would want, and it helps B&N sell said book. OTOH, an ad for the new title Necrophilia And Cemetery Porn Of The Deep South is not beneficial to either party (if it's displayed to me) because it's not something I'd ever be remotely interested in. Frankly, I'd much prefer the (accurately) targeted ad.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#166

Post by TheDong »

gpm wrote: post #128
mrspeaker wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha ha, "certification" is a cool idea, but it would be hard to get anyone to care about it. "Allow 5 seconds" is a feature I really want now - I might dig into the Firefox code (or No-Script) and see if I can figure it out! I have no-script on by default, and these days I need be convinced there's a REALLY good reason to temporarily whitelist a site. Sure, a lot of the web is now either a blank page (or "you need to…

I've wanted the "allow 5 seconds" thing for a long time too. You can manually pause and resume js by opening up the debugger and hitting pause. The code exists it just needs to be exposed to the UI.

How would this interact with onclick handlers on buttons and the like?

Would it be that after 5s the user couldn't interact with elements on the page like that (e.g. if they open an image, and wait a few seconds, they then couldn't close it because the 'x' onclick handler wouldn't run), or would each handler run by a user action (like an onclick) have 5 seconds to run?

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#167

Post by codezero »

charlesdaniels wrote: post #101
codezero wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also concerned with the general blacklists that are showing up. Some of the analytics companies in the list they are using from github don't use any particular fingerprinting technologies outside of setting a cookie. Given that there are a wide array of more aggressive and seemingly more malicious ways to fingerprint, bundling up cookie usage with that seems like a recipe for throwing the baby out with the bathwa…

That would suggest that there is such a thing as a "good" analytics company. From my perspective as and end user, why would it be desirable for me to facilitate the "analytics companies" business model? Sure, far-reaching blacklists are probably bad for analytics companies across the board, regardless of their intent. But as an end user, why should I care?

As an end user it shouldn’t be a concern you have as long as the data isn’t used for things you would find surprising.

Right now there’s no way for any analytics company to convince you they don’t do anything surprising.

I want my customers to run successful businesses and to use the data we collect on their behalf to help them do that.

Why should you care? Mostly hypotheticals, but as said above, it shouldn’t matter to you.

If analytics works, we can drive down costs, and improve how companies spend money on marketing and product development. This should mean more affordable and or higher quality products and services.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#168

Post by smadurange »

jefftk wrote: post #24

> In the coming months, we will start testing these protections with small groups of users and will continue to work with Disconnect to improve and expand the set of domains blocked by Firefox. We plan to enable these protections by default for all Firefox users in a future release. While lots of people here already have uMatrix or other blockers running, blocking fingerprinting and cryptomining domains by default wo…

Why the disclosure? Are you saying this in a personal capacity or is this the stance of Google Ads team?

Like, hey we love and embrace any technology that fights our team's fingerprinting efforts...

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#169

Post by smadurange »

oftenwrong wrote: post #64
jefftk wrote: post #24

> In the coming months, we will start testing these protections with small groups of users and will continue to work with Disconnect to improve and expand the set of domains blocked by Firefox. We plan to enable these protections by default for all Firefox users in a future release. While lots of people here already have uMatrix or other blockers running, blocking fingerprinting and cryptomining domains by default wo…

>(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google.) Is that relevant?

Didn't see your comment but I said the same thing. Just goes to show arrogance of Google right now they are sisaying in many fields. Because they probably think only they will have the capacity to effectively fingerprint if browsers fought back, because you know, its Google. Most weaker plays will drop out.

Re: Protections Against Fingerprinting and Crypto Mining in Firefox Nightly and Beta

#170

Post by bravoetch »

manigandham wrote: post #136
JohnFen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the same thing here. I disagree completely.

Why?

In this case the clue is the word fingerprinting. If someone outside your door was taking fingerprint impressions, your name, and then writing down your license plate and selling that info to anyone with money - would you just let that continue? Unlikely.
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