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posted by chromas on Tuesday May 14 2019, @03:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the Give-me-one-ping.-One-ping-only. dept.

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Blocking Hyperlink Auditing Tracking Pings with Extensions

For those who are not familiar with hyperlink auditing, or Pings, it is an HTML feature that allows sites to track when a link is clicked. Creating hyperlink auditing URLs is very easy, as you can simply create a normal hyperlink HTML tag, but also include a ping="[url]" variable as shown below.

<a href="https://www.google.com/" ping="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/pong.php">Ping Me</a>

[...] With most popular browsers now enabling this feature by default, with Firefox doing so in the future, the only way to disable hyperlink auditing is through the use of browser addons and extension. For those who want to retain control over whether this feature can be used, below are three extensions that allow you to disable hyperlink auditing pings in Chrome and Firefox.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 14 2019, @05:24AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 14 2019, @05:24AM (#843283)

    Awesomely evil. I was going to make a tampermonkey userscript to strip these out. Now I'll add an option to ping every single one before I remove it :)

    Starting Score:    0  points
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    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 14 2019, @07:35AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 14 2019, @07:35AM (#843305)

    I have a RaspPi running 24/7 which I use for tasks such as this (e.g. poisoning data that I haven't agreed to share). This seems like an excellent job for that computer. It can switch proxies regularly or can access the web via TOR, making it a little harder to block it based on originating IP. Sending pings to a different link every minute or so, or even more frequently, is a negligible workload. I can't find any details of the ping data. Is it simply accessing a specific URL or might there be some other data attached to it? Anyone got any ideas?

    • (Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday May 14 2019, @11:01AM

      by corey (2202) on Tuesday May 14 2019, @11:01AM (#843342)

      Lol. This is what I love about this community.

      Make sure to share the code/procedure.

      I just wish I had time to do this stuff now I've got kids.