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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#451

Post by executesorder66 »

Jestar342 wrote: post #86
kristofferR wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much more significant performance issue with web tracking is usually the absurd amount of JS loaded. It's almost impressive how they manage to load so much crap. Just visit a site like mediaite.com, the list of trackers is damn long.

For more than a decade I've been campaigning (to any of my employers that utilise adverts on their platform) to drop adverts with the primary factor being that of performance for page load. The last time I looked, adverts were adding an additional ~35% load time to the page. Anywhere from 5% to _60%_ (!!) of vistors were navigating away before page load completed (Varied depending on company/product of course) and a…

What was their rationale for not doing as you suggested?

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#453

Post by adrr »

mola wrote: post #398
adrr wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people didn’t want ads it wouldn’t be a multi billion business. Also your analogy is wrong. Your browser won’t execute code unless it requests it. Fax machine spam you don’t have do anything except have it connected to a live telephone connection. It’s more like complaining that your sole of your shoes is being worn out more because grocery stores put the milk in the back forcing you to walk past items you don’t i…

People don't want adds. how do you infer that people want ads because the ad industry is profitable? It's profitable because a few people want to influence and spy on a lot of people. Most people don't want ads they just tolerate them for getting actual services. Most these people don't even know how much tracking is involved and how nefarious this industry really is.

Why do they work? Why can I go start a business and scale it to millions of paying customers by using ads?

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#454

Post by josephg »

elzbardico wrote: post #386
bityard wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use checks because in the US there are certain things you can't use a credit card for, e.g. loan payments. I pay contractors with checks because almost none accept credit cards and cash gets cumbersome once you start getting into 4 and 5 digits. My local utilities all charge a "convenience fee" of a few dollars when paying online or with a credit card. Sending a check in the mail costs me only $0.50. (Even th…

Can't you use a wire-transfer or an ACH transfer? All those use cases are easily solved with electronic transactions in most of Europe, Asia and even in Latin American countries like brazil. They are usually inexpensive or free and instantaneous.

Australia too. Electronic transfers here are free and instant. When I used to rent I just set up a recurring payment through my bank’s website (free and easy, with any bank to any bank). Now my mortgage gets taken out each month automatically via a direct deposit authorisation. (ACH equivalent).

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#455

Post by novaRom »

tomjen3 wrote: post #442
andai wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some pages don't let you "Reject All" cookies, you have to uncheck them one by one, and there's literally hundreds of ad networks listed. It's spooky, I tell ya!

Sites can set as many cookies as they want. I have installed temporary containers (that is a Firefox only feature sadly), 15 minutes after I close the last tab in that group all those cookies are automatically deleted. Each tab group then has its own cookie container, so I can have multiple groups open and they don't share anything - I can login to different google (or any other service) accounts in different contain…

How do you circumvent browser fingerprinting? If every container has the same user agent, canvas, screen resolution, JS benchmark test results, etc. then no matter what but you are uniquely identified, bingo!

I really feel today having different devices with different browsers, connected to different providers is only working solution.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#457

Post by [deleted] »

wejick wrote: post #319
warent wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a network ad-block dns (pihole) and consistently 25-33% of all my network traffic is blocked as ads. It's much more than I ever imagined. Now I'm used to a different internet, when I'm using internet off the network it's like WTF is this?

My issue with pihole or any other DNS adblocker is I can't whitelist some website that I love. As evil as ada network, but I still want my favorite site to get some revenue.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#458

Post by DavideNL »

masa331 wrote: post #429
simias wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the root of all evil here is Javascript being opt-out instead of opt-in (and effectively mandatory for a big chunk of the internet these days). Letting any website and their friends (and the friends of their friends) run turing complete code on the client PC probably sounded reasonable when the web was created but it seems incredibly naive in hindsight. It's not as bad as ActiveX and other plugins, but it's…

No no no. The problem isn't JavaScript or web capabilities here. It's the companies and people who use them in evil ways. I would rather handle that even if it's much much harder.

Yea... You need either a law/sanctions, or a technical restriction that can't be circumvented.

Hopefully both, someday :)

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#459

Post by com2kid »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #403
sbarre wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really confused by this position. How do you propose that companies should promote their products and services, if not through advertising? Are you somehow suggesting that they should just sit there and hope that people who have never heard of their product independently decide they happen to want or need that product and seek it out, unprompted? You say "people part with their money for things they wouldn't thi…

> Are you somehow suggesting that they should just sit there and hope that people who have never heard of their product independently decide they happen to want or need that product and seek it out, unprompted? Yeah, it's even got a name: shopping.

> Yeah, it's even got a name: shopping.

So, for direct to consumer companies who only ship online, SEO?

Here's the thing: ads can be useful.

Awhile back I got a, highly targeted, ad for high protein sugar free cereal. That's awesome! I am 100% the target audience for that product, and until I saw that ad I had no clue it existed! To find a product like that I'd have to search for it, but I would never search for an entire new category of product that I didn't know about.

Same thing for the fitness app I am using (BodBot, it is amazing!). I am quite literally healthier right now because of a targeted advertisement.

Was I aware of fitness apps before then? Sure. But the ad for BodBot was informative about what features differentiated it from the literally hundreds, if not thousands, of other competing apps.

Do most ads suck? Sure. Should ads be highly invasive? Nope. But interest tracking and basic targeting actually help me find products and services that I want to buy!

Facebook in particular, for all the things wrong with it (long list!) has some amazingly relevant ads that inform me of products that I never knew about.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#460

Post by ogre_codes »

Macha wrote: post #401
daotoad wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people being so negative about this? If the terms whitelist/blacklist are hurtful to some people because of all the racial baggage we've applied to the words white and black, why not switch to allow/deny instead? Using allow/deny is more explicit and doesn't rely on the benign cultural associations with the colors black and white. The choice of colors used here is arbitrary. For example, one could just as eas…

There is a real cost to changing APIs/documentation/UIs. My experience talking to black (one African, one European) coworkers is their reaction is "That's the problem you're going to fix?". When the company does a companywide initative to remove "problematic" terms from APIs/documentation, but doesn't stop funding of politicians who support voter suppression that predominantly affect black people in real practical wa…

> There is a real cost to changing APIs/documentation/UIs.

This is an OSS project. If someone cares enough about it, they should submit a (non-breaking) patch along with a patch for the documentation. There are no costs to people who don't find it a valuable change.

> My experience talking to black (one African, one European) coworkers is their reaction is "That's the problem you're going to fix?".

Obviously this isn't fixing any of the fundamental issues, but it does bother some people. My preference is to respect the people who have problems with it. An easy policy is to simply avoid creating new software which uses that terminology and to accept any patches which fix it. That way the people who feel the change is important bear the burden of the cost (which is likely small some thing like this).

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