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posted by janrinok on Tuesday January 29 2019, @09:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the track-me-not dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Mozilla Foundation has announced its intent to reduce the ability of websites and other online services to track users of its Firefox browser around the internet.

At this stage, Moz's actions are baby steps. In support of its decision in late 2018 to reduce the amount of tracking it permits, the organisation has now published a tracking policy to tell people what it will block.

Moz said the focus of the policy is to bring the curtain down on tracking techniques that "cannot be meaningfully understood or controlled by users".

Notoriously intrusive tracking techniques allow users to be followed and profiled around the web. Facebook planting trackers wherever a site has a "Like" button is a good example. A user without a Facebook account can still be tracked as a unique individual as they visit different news sites. Mozilla's policy said these "stateful identifiers are often used by third parties to associate browsing across multiple websites with the same user and to build profiles of those users, in violation of the user's expectation". So, out they go.

Of course, that's not the only technique used for cross-site tracking. As detailed in Mozilla's policy, some sites "decorate" URLs with user identifiers to make the user identity available to other websites. Firefox isn't yet ready to block that kind of behaviour, but Mozilla said: "We may apply additional restrictions to the third parties engaged in this type of tracking in future."

Sites will be able to use URL parameters for activities such as advertisement conversion tracking, the policy said, so long as that isn't abused to identify individuals.

Mozilla has also flagged browser fingerprinting (tagging an individual by the fonts they have installed is the most familiar example) and supercookies for future removal.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @09:31PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @09:31PM (#793759)

    It would be nice with an internet sherif around town, but I don't know if Moz will be any good at it. Whatever, it's better than the last one.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @01:48PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @01:48PM (#794042)

    I'm not too sure that the people planning on blocking ad blockers can be trusted when it comes to user privacy

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:34PM

      by Freeman (732) on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:34PM (#794146) Journal

      That would be Google you're talking about, not Mozilla.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"