Can you remove Pocket yet?
You can through an about:config/user.js flag:
user_pref("extensions.pocket.enabled", false);Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
171–180 of 209 posts
Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd like to have that option, but i can understand why they did it this way. If you just hide the notification then the site can still use them to get around other restrictions like how much time the javascript is allowed to run in the background and things like that.
Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.” (…
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Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
#174The 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…
They now have a setting in content blocking that lets you choose between a less or more aggressive block list similar to how ublock works.
I rarely see things break anymore.
Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
#175The 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.
Your utility only takes payments through their website? That's hard to believe. In most places I've lived, the utility companies contract with various local businesses to allow you to pay your bills in person through them, and all have still accepted payments through the mail.
Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
#176Earlier 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.
You can run self-hosted analytics without any client side JS. So no. You can't even block those (except if you disallowed any session cookies, but then the site might not work at all if it's login-based).
Theoretically you could use the same way to feed third-party analytics too though.
Even without cookies and without JS you can still get some data for analytics.
Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.” (…
Those aren't the reasons, they're just attempts at finding an argument that will make people lay down and take it.
Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
#178I see one risk for Firefox: if they block all trackers, e.g. Google Analytics, then it would appear to people viewing browser statistics in Google Analytics that no-one is using Firefox, and thus the developers will be told they don't need to test anything on Firefox.
That’s already been happening for quite some time now.
Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more I protect my personal data (hi, GDPR!), the more websites are adding recaptacha to all their pages. Blocking trackers makes Google suspicious, so they're adding more and more recaptcha challenges to let me pass their tests, sometimes 5 to 10 in a row. I'm now working for Google's IA for free just to be able to make purchases online, access some services that I already paid for, or filling in support request…
Has been said many times before but the problem is that you look like any other bot that also doesn't save cookies or have any past history. How do you expect recaptcha to identify you from those bots? Or more, how do you expect the websites to identify bots and stop things like credential stuffing attacks (even if recaptcha isn't perfect at stopping those either) without heavily investing in things like the anti-bot…
I don't know, and at this point, I don't care.
Sites have brought this sort of thing on themselves by enabling (or directly engaging in) the abuse of users. That abuse forces me to take a very defensive posture when browsing the web. It's simply a matter of self defense.
If that means that I can't access the sites, whether it's because of recaptcha or other issues, then I won't access the sites. Easy.
Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
#180The 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…
Browser Fingerprinting is also used for fraud detection and identify verification. There is often overlap between persistent tracking and security verification services.