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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, Flamebait) by Arik on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:01PM (5 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday January 29 2019, @11:59PM (1 child)
Since it seems the only one** to do it, does it matter how proper they do it?
** maybe except the Tor-browser firefox-derivative
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:47AM
Doing things like this incorrectly is worse than not doing them at all. It deceives people into taking actions that do not benefit them, and gives them a false sense of security which can lead to very bad things as well.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Informative) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:32PM (2 children)
So what's your alternative? Competitors like Chrome/Edge, which not only don't even try to protect your privacy, but will now actively sabotage your own efforts to protect it too? Or trusting some one or two person dev team who forked the Firefox code from two or three years ago?
It may or may not be as effective as they claim, but at least they're trying. And it's open source, so if it sucks we theoretically can fix it. Or just keep using extensions, since Mozilla seems to be the one major browser vendor that's not trying to fuck those all up right now...
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:46AM (1 child)
A solution that is unfortunately far beyond the abilities of most computer users, of course, and that's just how silicon valley seems to want it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:16PM
Well, I think non-profit isn't necessarily the important part here, and if you focus on that as the solution then it gets rather depressing. Non-profits can successfully avoid a lot of the "MBA Playbook" investor stupidity of making dumb decisions to chase a fad or to appeal to a mass market, or of selling off their future to increase returns in the next quarter...but they're still vulnerable to general institutional failures of corruption, greed, design by committee, and things of that nature.
But the fact that it's open source...that's where you can get some optimism. Firefox can, at least in theory, survive any dumb decision made my Mozilla. Even if the Mozilla Foundation collapses entirely, it can't take the code to the grave with it. Another organization can pick up where they left off, avoiding their mistakes while reaping the benefits of their prior investments. With proprietary software, every new start-up is building their thing from scratch. They might have better tools that make it quicker if they're starting a few years later, but they don't have the code from the last ten startups who had the same idea. With open source, companies and organizations can rise and fall while the code just keeps moving forward.
Of course, large and long-lived organizations leading a project has its advantages too, even if it's just greater stability and planning than a series of short-lived successors. And personally, when it comes to something like avoiding or quickly alerting of and patching major exploits, I still trust Mozilla more than I'd trust something like Pale Moon. The dev team for PM just seems too small, and in many ways the organization has less to lose simply because it has less in general. And if it's a one developer project, then there's only one person who has to screw up or become compromised to put the whole project at risk. And the smaller the user base, the fewer people looking for problems. There's probably an optimal size for such an organization -- too small or too big both have their risks.
So based on that, I'm starting to think that what we ideally need are multiple organizations contributing to the same software. Kinda like Linux has so many different distros who all put their own spin on a common kernel and common software packages. Chromium is kinda headed in that direction I guess, it's just a shame that it's created by and so strongly tied to a company with a long history of using open source as step one in their own Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And now they're being joined by the founder of that whole strategy. If Mozilla picked up Chromium it actually might be OK, because at least then there would be one larger organization pushing it in a more user-centric direction...but I'd rather have a coalition of a few open source non-profits. We have literally hundreds of distros for the base OS; surely the browser is important enough to have two or three...?
But of course...we should have done that ten years ago, when Firefox had a large market share that would still be large even if it had split. Now we have to worry about the larger strategy -- do you stay with Firefox to try to boost that 5% market share and prevent it from being locked out of the market due to web devs who figure it's not worth testing/targeting? Or do you start campaigning for a fork like Pale Moon to try to diversify?