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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, Insightful) by zeigerpuppy on Wednesday January 30 2019, @02:56AM (7 children)
With Google and Facebook tracking everyone and cooperating with nation states we need more companies that recognise basic privacy as a right. Apple and Microsoft have also become spy companies sending huge amounts of telemetry to their own servers (yes, Apple, try installing Little Snitch and marvel at the number of.connections to Apple tracking servers).
At this point, Mozilla and the EFF are about the only ones speaking up about these issues. That's enough reason for me to use Firefox. If you need more, think about how the chromium core is being shifted to Google's whim by chipping away at web standards, prioritising Google mobile protocols and now wanting to break ad blockers.
Also, if you haven't used Firefox for a while, give it a go... There's been a lot of progress with speed and stability over the last year.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:50AM (3 children)
After Firefox broke the key-mapping extension, I finally gave up on them. Pale Moon / New Moon is my preferred flavour now.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 30 2019, @12:20PM (1 child)
I give him a cookie.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:36PM
Isn't the whole point of TFA about trying to *avoid* stuff like cookies? ;)
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:09PM
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 30 2019, @12:19PM (2 children)
While Tim Cook is always boasting about Apple's respect for user privacy, he's also quite clear that they hand over your left nut if its stored on iCloud, provided The Law serve them a properly executed warrant.
So I don't use iCloud.
And what do I have to hide?
- Cafe Restroom Codes
- Albums I Want To Buy
- Just The First Names Of New Friends
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:51AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday January 31 2019, @07:50AM
Well the view of many people outside of the USA, and possibly quite a few inside it too, is that most of the US's major software offerings (Apple's iPhone et al, Facebook, Twitter etc) are primarily used to gather personal information. If - and it is a very tenuous 'if' - the US intelligence community does have access to all of the data collected then they have gained significant penetration of the global community. Of course, Russia and China in particular still have their own offerings, but that only changes who exploits the data rather than protect their own citizens from the US.
I'll have to purchase some more tinfoil - my present hat is getting rather worn nowadays.