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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: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Wednesday January 30 2019, @07:44AM (5 children)
I agree with you completely, which is why I use uMatrix and uBlock Origin, which make life inconvenient for some things, but make my web-browsing a mostly ad-free experience, and less tracked than I normally would be: even so, looking at Firefox Lightbeam [wikipedia.org] is a sobering experience.
That said, webmasters who use the technique I highlighted are explicitly giving you the option of running the tracking scripts or not, with a default of not.
One problem is the huge social pressure to conform: if you don't have a Facebook Account, don't use somebody's webmail (Google's and Microsoft's offerings are the effective default around here), and don't use social media, you are regarded as a weirdo. I've been enough of a social outcast since childhood for it not to affect me that much, but I see the effect it has on others. Social pressure is very real.
Scripting and tracking on websites is a side-issue almost lost in the noise compared to smartphone app usage.
If you really want to campaign for privacy and security, you also need to campaign against 'Trusted Computing', and the use of ancillary hardware that will not work without the use of digitally signed, often encrypted or at least obfuscated and usually proprietary firmware. You do not know what Intel's management engine is doing on your PC; or AMD's PSP; or the 'baseband processor [wikipedia.org]' in your mobile phone.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday January 30 2019, @11:59AM (2 children)
Human herd behavior. You can do something that's incredibly stupid, incredibly harmful both to yourself and others, and as long as the herd was doing the same thing you escape all blame. If you do something that makes sense and benefits everyone, but you went against the herd, then you'll get hate.
That's a pretty basic problem with our race, it's not limited to computing.
"I've been enough of a social outcast since childhood for it not to affect me that much, but I see the effect it has on others. Social pressure is very real."
Oh I know. I wince every time someone I like tells me to friend them on facebook, follow on twatter; yeah no. As more and more people dive into the furnace, it gets harder and harder to socialize without falling into it yourself.
"Scripting and tracking on websites is a side-issue almost lost in the noise compared to smartphone app usage."
Yeah, and me always on the lookout for a good 'dumb' phone - the 'dumber' the better, because what they're calling smart just isn't.
IME and PSP are atrocities, no disagreement there.
These are the issues that converted me from an eager early adopter who shoveled money (both my own and more substantially, institutional money in many caes) into the PC industry in the early years just as fast as I could to someone that goes to greater lengths every year to avoid feeding the cancer.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 30 2019, @12:11PM
Hits to my writing have skyrocketed since I accepted Facebook's maximum of five thousand friends.
When I made the decision to go public with my mental illness in 1997 - in response to the Spring '97 Mass Suicide of the Heaven's Gate UFO Cult in San Diego - I crossed a whole bunch of Rubicons.
It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to avoid tracking. So far I draw sufficient comfort by blackholing most of the top tracking pixel servers.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 30 2019, @12:16PM
If a Mobile Website is available - as for Twitter for example - I use that website rather than the likely far-better app.
This because I attended a talk on Mobile Analytics: "Wouldn't you like to know which buttons your users are tapping?"
While in principle JS enables that for websites, it would be such a huge PITA that I expect few actually implement detailed user tracking. But the FREE DEVELOPER SDKS!!!111!!OMG PONIES!!! enable very fine-grained tracking of UI choices in apps.
I only use two or three Mac App Store apps; the rest I downloaded direct. While both kinds could just as readily have such "analytics" built in, I figure the App Store ones are far more likely to actually have them.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 30 2019, @12:07PM (1 child)
If you use it as a master key to encrypt your disk, then any attempts to unlock your disk must take place on your box.
That is, it would not work to copy a disk image to a Beowulf Cluster Of National Securities.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 30 2019, @05:27PM
Either they copy your files remotely over the network -- in which case the TPM doesn't matter -- or they get physical access to your box to image the drive -- in which case, they can copy or confiscate the TPM too.