Firefox removes "do not track" feature support

Post by godshatter » Tue, Dec 10, 2024, 8:28 PM UTC

darkhorse222 wrote: post #102

coldpie wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would love if the cookie modals on each site became browser-level They are, in a roundabout way. Hop into your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Banners and Annoyances filters. The modal gets silently nuked in the background and you can carry on with your browsing. Since you never consented, this ought to be functionally the same as Declining the banner. The Kill Sticky bookmark works similarly, for cr…

As long as someone who does this is prepared to pay for every site they do it on (or forgo the site in the future), since targeted advertising often pays for the site they're visiting. Personally I would like to see ads improved, not removed, as I am unwilling to have 40 different subscriptions to 40 different websites all because every user disabled targeting.

Post by cpeterso » Tue, Dec 10, 2024, 8:30 PM UTC

necubi wrote: post #141

gkoberger wrote: post #67

I was at Mozilla when this was implemented. It was completely optional for websites to support this. A few did at first. A lot of people internally wanted it to be on-by-default, but the argument was that if it was, nobody would respect it – after all, what tracking platform would willingly only track the 0.1% of people who went into the settings to enable it? (Internet Explorer did eventually enable it by default, w…

I worked at one of the big adtech companies at the time. DNT was a carefully negotiated compromise between the ad industry (and by proxy, the sites that depended on it for their income), the browser vendors, and privacy advocates. We implemented DNT it in our edge infrastructure and were ready to deploy it. But then Microsoft broke the agreement by enabling it by default, as part of their war with Google (and after t…

Post by throwaway48476 » Tue, Dec 10, 2024, 8:32 PM UTC

gkoberger wrote: post #156

miki123211 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a new browser could genuinely gain massive popularity if it was really good at this, and advertised the feature heavily, particularly in the EU. Google will never touch it with a hundred-foot pole due to antitrust concerns, they're effectively banned from making any significant, user-experience-affecting changes to Chrome at this point. Many people would immediately switch to a browser with 1) reliable Youtub…

I somewhat agree... but browsers aren't a profitable business. In 30 years of browsers being mainstream, nobody has built one that's sustainable –– only works if it's subsidized by a larger company. There's been a few attempts (Brave wants to monetize via crypto, Arc is pivoting away), but it's really hard. People don't want to pray for a browser – 99% of people are apathetic, and the 1% that cares aren't known for p…

Post by Vinnl » Tue, Dec 10, 2024, 8:34 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #24

elashri wrote: post #16

I understand that many people here have a bad taste of Mozilla's recent actions in many aspects. But the reality here is that this is at worst removing something that almost nobody respected. It was based on honor system and even in Switzerland they do have random inspections for honor system. Browsers never had any enforcement of this feature. And ironically it was used as additional data point of tracking privacy a…

Medium supported it for ages. Tools like Matomo came with support for it by default. Firefox has implemented the replacement, Global Privacy Control. It has the exact same problems and isn't respected either, except even fewer websites have implementations that respect GPC. It's not a real solution to the normalised cyberstalking websites practice today, but it's also not entirely useless.

Post by mathfailure » Tue, Dec 10, 2024, 8:36 PM UTC

gkoberger wrote: post #119

mathfailure wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I had nothing to do with any of this, but go off I guess.