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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by BsAtHome on Tuesday January 29 2019, @09:57PM (5 children)
Even worse, you have no way for a remedy. A non-user cannot say to FB to delete all non-user related data. You are not a user, so they can simply say "we do not have any of your data". The burden of proof falls upon you, the tracked party, and you have no real way to prove that they hold any of your data.
Tracking is a problem addressed within the GDPR, where you need to give explicit consent. However, if you cannot prove that your data was illegally taken, stored, used and/or abused by a specific party, then you have no standing. This problem is not limited to FB, but goes for any third party embedded into a site directly or indirectly.
As a user, you can only try to block as much crap as possible to reduce your footprint. That is a hard job and requires very strong discipline and diligence.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 30 2019, @11:59AM
... the high-power law firm who accepts your class action lawsuit on spec.
They'll usually get forty percent of the five hundred million dollar settlement; sixty percent will be divided among the planets seven billion people.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 30 2019, @12:00PM (2 children)
You just ask Zuckerman, during his deposition.
They also have to turn over all their tapes during discovery.
In the US at least, Civil Respondents do _not_ have the right against Self-Incrimination that Criminal Defendants have.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday January 30 2019, @01:10PM
Yeah. Remind me again when he's going to visit the UK [engadget.com] for that deposition?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:38PM
That's not quite right. Civil deponents can plead the Fifth, but the Fifth only applies to crimes, not to civil wrongs (torts, breaches of contract, etc.).
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:43PM
You're spot-on, and that's why we (USA) need much stronger privacy laws too. Then, when someone DOES prove that a company is gathering data / tracking illegally, the jackboots can storm them and seize their computers / servers. But I'm not in favor of that kind of govt. heavy-handedness because it punishes innocents too, so a more fair response would be to copy the hard drives and analyze them for privacy violations, and prosecute later.
But it brings up an interesting question: Apache logs server / website / file access with date, time, IP address, and possibly much more if you enable forensic logging. So would that logging be considered "tracking"?? Or would "tracking" (hopefully) be what is done with those logs- the analysis, compiling, correlating, aggregating, processing, sharing, selling, etc., of that log data?
All that said, you could logically infer that someone is tracking you by what's coming to you. For instance, ads on one website that reflect some connection to something you were shopping for on another website should certainly give rise to investigation.