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Do_not_track

donottrack.sh

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41–50 of 179 posts

Re: Do_not_track

#41

Post by woodson »

spudlyo wrote: post #6

I was surprised how hard it was to stop the Python transformers library from phoning home to Hugging Face. I set HF_HUB_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1, and when I called Wav2Vec2CTCTokenizer.from_pretrained I explicitly passed local_files_only=True, but still I got got a warning about not having a valid HF_TOKEN. It wasn't until I stumbled upon HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1 that I'm somewhat confident that I'm not making outgoing connection…

HF is notorious for making it difficult to work offline (or at least not waste time trying to connect when everything needed is offline) and is constantly changing how it is being handled. Previously, there was TRANSFORMERS_OFFLINE, HF_DATASETS_OFFLINE, etc.

Re: Do_not_track

#42

Post by GuB-42 »

ximm wrote: post #10

Looks like a helpful honeypot! Any tool that will public announce support for this spec is a tool I know to avoid because it collects telemetry without explicit opt-in in the first place.

DO_NOT_TRACK support doesn't mean tracking is not an explicit opt-in.

Example: the software crashes, and there is a crash handler that asks you if you want to send a crash dump. With DO_NOT_TRACK, the crash handler is disabled entirely, no question, no dump.

If it gets some adoption, that's probably how it will work. Those who have an financial interest in using tracking (ex: ads) probably won't support such an option.

Re: Do_not_track

#43

Post by binaryturtle »

This is just sad. Luckily I do not use any of the listed programs. I threw out Homebrew many years ago when they started this nonsense.

The only tool I have installed currently that does %/"($& like this is Deno (required for yt-dlp now). It phones happily home even if you wrap it into a wrapper script that forces the env variable (in no way I'll pollute my default environment with stuff like this):

    $ cat /usr/local/bin/deno
    #!/bin/sh
    exec env DENO_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 /usr/local/packages/deno/latest/bin/deno "$@"
I wish bad dreams to whoever puts such crap into their software! Thankfully I have Little Snitch to catch most of those kind of invasions of my privacy.

Re: Do_not_track

#45

Post by mmooss »

LocalH wrote: post #24
PufPufPuf wrote: post #19

This is set up for the same fate as DNT in browsers. Collecting all the "do not track" env vars into a single "do_not_track.env" file, however, may not be a bad idea...

Advertisers chose to ignore DNT because they claimed Microsoft making DNT enabled by default took agency away from the user. In reality, they probably weren't going to honor it anyway.

Microsoft is too sophisticated to plead ignorance; they are responsible for that outcome and I think we can assume they knowningly chose it. (Though now Microsoft browsers are such a small portion of the market that it doesn't matter.)

The biggest failure of DNT was browser makers - including Mozilla - removing it. It has zero performance impact (1 bit?) or development cost. As long as it was out there, when there was momentum against tracking, advocates had evidence of both demand for privacy and of trackers ignoring user wishes.

Re: Do_not_track

#46

Post by mmooss »

amelius wrote: post #40

You can also use network namespaces to simply block internet access for certain processes. It can even be finetuned with whitelists or blacklists.

Could you provide more details? Many applications use multiple processes, and use some intermittently. It seems like quite a bit of work to enumerate every process used and then to keep the white/blacklist updated as usage and software changes - every new application or command you use, every update, every OS change that affects networking or system calls etc ...

Re: Do_not_track

#47

Post by mmooss »

victorkulla wrote: post #32

The issue is that it is not enforced. My version of My IP will tell you if 'Do Not track' and 'Global Privacy Control' are set by your browser but it is up to the website to honour your requests. Check if your browser is sending them by visiting: https://fshot.org/utils/myip.php

That's great, but isn't DNT deprecated?

Re: Do_not_track

#49

Post by slashdev »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #39

I don't think there is any way to stop people from tracking you. Technically speaking, you can pretty much always be tracked. Even if you eliminated all third party requests you could still be tracked. Downloads, logins, queries, etc all can be tracked. Virtually all software now has the "continuously upgrade to the latest version" bullshit so you are tracked every time you open the app. Even if you turn it off, they…

It’s already a law in Europe. GDPR and ePrivacy. You have to get consent from the user. Having worked for European companies, they take it seriously.

Re: Do_not_track

#50

Post by pizzly »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #39

I don't think there is any way to stop people from tracking you. Technically speaking, you can pretty much always be tracked. Even if you eliminated all third party requests you could still be tracked. Downloads, logins, queries, etc all can be tracked. Virtually all software now has the "continuously upgrade to the latest version" bullshit so you are tracked every time you open the app. Even if you turn it off, they…

Also every time you install a program Microsoft, Apple and Google knows depending on the device. For your safety of course. The tracking is so pervasive and the majority of people do not care.
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