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Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

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Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#161

Post by kevingadd »

ric2b wrote: post #81
zimbatm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just actively punishing Firefox because blocking tracking is also blocking ads, which is their revenue model. Why spend money optimizing for a browser that doesn't generate revenue? If Firefox becomes the bastion of privacy sensitive people it will become more and more like Tor users, all tainted with the same labels. I mean it's already the case that recaptcha will more likely trigger on Firefox than Chrome, aski…

> 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.

I agree but podcasting services often track users now - podcasters use services like ACast to generate unique targeted versions of the podcast mp3 on-download when people use feed managers to download.

When I download a few different podcasts, I get an mp3 with targeted ads inserted in it, and they're presumably connecting IP geolocation info.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#162

Post by autoexec »

dhimes wrote: post #148
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…

Definitely complain to the site: an email saying that the site allows possible exploits might get somebody's attention. But if I still need to allow/use the site, I use containers. Hopefully this gives me some security.

I agree you should email the site, but i would be careful not to suggest the site is vulnerable unless you have clear evidence of that or you risk not being taken seriously. Just be honest about it. The devs might not want that shit on their sites either, but were told they had to include them in which case they'd probably love to have something to show it's causing users problems.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#163

Post by saberworks »

magduf wrote: post #115
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…

>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.

The Toyota Financial web site (if you finance a Toyota/Lexus through them) became horribly broken recently. It required me to jump through so many hoops to log in (including turning off ad blocker, turning off tracking protection, not using "private browsing mode," etc.) that I just got fed up with it and went back to paper billing. It's so ridiculous.

I actually pay through my online banking now but I'm forced to receive paper bills unless I agreed to some insanely-long new T&C.

The online banking I use (some local credit union) uses a 3rd-party site so in order to use it I must accept 3rd party cookies on this site. But you don't whitelist you have to find and whitelist which requires some knowledge/skill in this area. I don't know how any "normal" user will be able to use Firefox after these updates; if you can't log in to your bank you're just going to go back to Chrome, right?

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#164

Post by mcintyre1994 »

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…

Somewhat related, I saw a site today that did a fake Cloudflare style bot check countdown, and then said “click allow to confirm you’re not a bot” before popping up a notification send request UI. I bailed then but presumably it wouldn’t show anything if you declined that, who knows what spam they were sending if you didn’t. Thought that was a clever-ish very shitty way to work around permissions.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#165

Post by akerro »

toastal wrote: post #34
akerro wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have piwik instead GA 2-5 years ago, according to piwik my website had 23% more visitors than on GA. https://matomo.org/

10 years later and still no PostgreSQL support.

Also no support for ELK and plain-text-folder-managed data structure, so what? do one thing and do it well.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#166

Post by joaobeno »

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..

Here is why they track and collect:

“Hiding within those mounds of data is knowledge that could change the life of a patient, or change the world.” (Atul Butte, Stanford)

"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine” (Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President, Gartner)

“Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway.” (Geoffrey Moore, author and consultant)

.

.

.

And the quotes go on and on...

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#168

Post by dhimes »

autoexec wrote: post #162
dhimes wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely complain to the site: an email saying that the site allows possible exploits might get somebody's attention. But if I still need to allow/use the site, I use containers. Hopefully this gives me some security.

I agree you should email the site, but i would be careful not to suggest the site is vulnerable unless you have clear evidence of that or you risk not being taken seriously. Just be honest about it. The devs might not want that shit on their sites either, but were told they had to include them in which case they'd probably love to have something to show it's causing users problems.

Excellent point.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#169

Post by MaxBarraclough »

babuskov wrote: post #27
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…

> 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.

No need. Use Incognito/Private Browsing.

With the usual provisos, of course:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evercookie

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#170

Post by gtsteve »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #164
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…

Somewhat related, I saw a site today that did a fake Cloudflare style bot check countdown, and then said “click allow to confirm you’re not a bot” before popping up a notification send request UI. I bailed then but presumably it wouldn’t show anything if you declined that, who knows what spam they were sending if you didn’t. Thought that was a clever-ish very shitty way to work around permissions.

I had hoped that the notification API would just silently not send a notification if the user had explicitly denied this. Unfortunately that's not the case: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...

It's a shame the designers of this feature didn't think of the abuse potential.

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