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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: 4, Informative) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 30 2019, @02:56AM (2 children)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday January 30 2019, @02:56AM (#793878) Homepage

    I hope for your sake you aren't supporting them financially, lest they spend 15k USD of your money replacing master/slave terminology in source code.

    https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/10/mozilla-open-source-support-first-awards-made/ [mozilla.org]

    "Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, APIs and tests, and also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud."

    Theoretically that money also goes toward improvements, but it's interesting how it's worded that suggests where their priorities lie. Also, as someone who has worked on and used Buildbot, that piece of shit isn't worth saving; they would have been better off spending that 15k on a new build system from scratch (but then again, if it costs 15k to do a search and replace, developing a build system is probably beyond them).

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:30PM (#794143)

    I just wish they weren't already so screwed up that rooting for the underdog feels dirty and like a lost cause.

  • (Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:07PM

    by iWantToKeepAnon (686) on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:07PM (#794589) Homepage Journal
    I'm offended by their use of "BOT", after all AI bots have feelings too. Let's spend 15k scrubbing BOT out of everything. "Build Sentient Assistant" would be a good start. But then "Assistant" is a subservient word and nobody like that either. Hrm......
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