601–610 of 836 posts
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Firefox FTW. I was relieved to find this was a Chrome-only problem.
Turns out Firefox has a similar issue, despite mitigations :( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1372288
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coveryoutracks always tells me I'm unique Which is concerning. Until you realise I do the same thing a few days later and I'm still unique.
It tells you that you have a unique fingerprint. It is not telling you that the test site has never seen you before, because the eff isn't storing your fingerprint for later analysis and tracking It could actually tell you about which real tracking vendors are showing you as "Seen and tracked" so it's pretty annoying they don't do that. If that site shows you as having a unique fingerprint, I guarantee you are being…
If it doesn't store the fingerprints then how does it tell the difference between
5 identical looking browsers connecting from 5 different IPs
1 browser connecting 5 times from 5 different IPs
The headline seems pretty misleading. Here’s what seems to actually be going on: > Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions. The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers. This does seem invasive. It also seems like what I’d expect…
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This, to me, seems like the more salient point. A headline like “Major browsers allow websites to see your installed extensions” seems more appropriate here. We’ve known for a long time that advertisers/“security” vendors use as many detectable characteristics as possible to constrict unique fingerprints. This seems like a major enabler of even more invasive fingerprinting and that seems like the bigger issue here.
Well it would be more appropriate headline if it would be about broken browser behavior. But this is about major corporation sneakily abusing this to ilegally extract specific sensitive data which they are abusing.
If a company leaks my sensitive data, I get some nice junkmail offering me some period of time of credit monitoring or whatever so what are browsers doing to prevent this?
The issue should never be 'We want entities to have this data but only use it in some constrained and arbitrary manner that we can't even agree about it's definition.' instead 'This data shouldn't be made available to X'
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I integrate these kinds of systems in order to prevent criminals from being able to use our ecommerce platform to utilize stolen credit cards. That involves integrating with tracking providers to best recognize whether a purchase is being made by a bot or not, whether it matches "Normal" signals for that kind of order, and importantly, whether the credit card is being used by the normal tracking identity that uses it…
> Even the GDPR gives us enormous leeway to do literally this, but it requires participating in tracking networks that have what amounts to a total knowledge of purchases and browsing you do on the internet. That's the only way they work at all. That data sounds like it would be very valuable. But I think if I sell widgets and a prospective customer browsers my site, telling my competitors (via a data broker) that cu…
How much is that currently? $600M?
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> How is probing your browser for installed extensions not "scanning your computer"? I think most people would interpret “scanning your computer” as breaking out of the confines the browser and gathering information from the computer itself. If this was happening, the magnitude of the scandal would be hard to overstate. But this is not happening. What actually is happening is still a problem. But the hyperbole underm…
> What the article describes sounds like what many devs would land on given the browser APIs available. > To reiterate, at no point am I saying this is good or acceptable. I think there’s a massive privacy problem in the tech industry that needs to be addressed. These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects. What t…
In short, you are not going to solve this problem blaming developer ethics. You need regulation. To get the right regulation we need to get rid of PACs and lobbying.
The headline seems pretty misleading. Here’s what seems to actually be going on: > Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions. The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers. This does seem invasive. It also seems like what I’d expect…
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> What the article describes sounds like what many devs would land on given the browser APIs available. > To reiterate, at no point am I saying this is good or acceptable. I think there’s a massive privacy problem in the tech industry that needs to be addressed. These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects. What t…
> These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects. One reason your boss is eager to replace everyone with language models, they won’t have any “ethical backbone” :’)