Get fucked, advertisers.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Advertisers track you with device fingerprinting and behaviour profiling now. Firefox doesn't do much to obscure the more advanced methods of tracking.
Don't all the advanced ways rely on JavaScript?
Lots do. But do you know anyone that turns JS off anymore? Platforms don't care if they miss the odd user for this - because almost no one will be missed.
"Anymore"? I've never met a single soul who knows this is even possible. I myself don't even know how to do it if I wanted to.
I do use NoScript, which does this on a site-by-site basis, but even that is considered extremely niche. I've never met another NoScripter in the wild.
Am I in the wild? I use it.
The people who I've tried to get on NoScript seem to have the brain capacity of goldfish. If the site doesn't instantly work, it's as if the sky has fallen and there is no way to convince them to pay attention to which scripts are actually needed.
It's a rare breed that is willing to put up with toggling different scripts on and off. I'll also acknowledge that too many people (including me) are in a giant rush. For work-type stuff, I have the laptop without noscript, because sometimes I do need something to work absolutely right now.
You don't think you are being a tad judgemental?
People whose lives revolve around fashion probably think you dress like shit.
People who love food probably think you eat like shit.
People who love cars probably think you are a shit driver.
You probably love computers and care about privacy, and you are shitting on regular users(assumption, admittedly) for not being invested.
They had something that was working, you present noscript, thing no longer works. If you are not invested, how are you going to see the appeal of extra work?
I go hard with DNS-based ad blocking and I’m constantly confirming it works by checking the network tab in developer tools. I’m basically only seeing first party scripts and CDN assets — 99% of websites load all the tracking garbage from third-party domains that can be easily blocked.
Not all but most, yes. But TBF, sites that still function with JS disabled tend to have the least intrusive telemetry, and might pre-date big data altogether.
Regardless, unless the extent of a page’s analytics is a “you are the #th visitor” counter, all countermeasures must remain active.
For those who don't care to read the full article:
This basically just confines any cookies generated on a page, to just that page.
So, instead of a cookie from, say, Facebook, being stored on site A, then requested for tracking purposes on site B, each individual site would be sent its own separate Facebook cookie, that only gets used on that site, preventing it from tracking you anywhere outside of the specific site you got it from in the first place.
Hahahahaha so it doesn't break anything that still relies on cookies, but neuters the ability to share them.
That's awesome
Honestly, I thought that's how it already worked.
Edit: I think what I'm remembering is that you can define the cookies by site/domain, and restrict to just those. And normally would, for security reasons.
But some asshole sites like Facebook are cookies that are world-readable for tracking, and this breaks that.
Someone correct me if I got it wrong.
Total Cookie Protection was already a feature, (introduced on Feb 23st 2021) but it was only for people using Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) on strict mode.
They had a less powerful third-party cookie blocking feature for users that didn't have ETP on strict mode, that blocked third party cookies on specific block lists. (i.e. known tracking companies)
This just expanded that original functionality, by making it happen on any domain, and have it be the default for all users, rather than an opt-in feature of Enhanced Tracking Protection.
Article from JUNE 14, 2022
I think this tips it over the edge for me to switch to Firefox
I hope so! It's a wonderful side of the Internet to be on
I prefer waterfox. Hard to trust Mozilla Corpos.
As long as it's not Chromium, I'm happy people aren't just handing over the keys to the Internet to Google.
Yeah, Waterfox is just another browser built on top of the Mozilla's GECKO engine. But without all the AI dickriding.
How terrible to offer client-side translation or webpage description for differently abled people!
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This is old news, from 2022!!
From the blog post:
"June 14, 2022"
"Updated Aug. 28, 2024"
"And starting in 2024, all our users can look forward to Firefox blocking even more third party cookies."
Except it's still out of date because it mentions chrome also blocking third party cookies when at this point in time they've announced that they've abandoned that course of action now.
Alright fine ill switch browsers AGAIN
Maybe they should try to develop the uBlock Origin extension with the dev to make it last more.
making Firefox the most private and secure major browser
If calling home and to selected 3rd party analytics aren't part of the metric then yes, Firefox might be the most private. What proof, even they say they've telemetry.
Here's all the domain Firefox uses for telemetry: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MrRawes/firefox-hosts/firefox-hosts/hosts
So much for privacy.
Just move to LibreWolf.
You're aware that LibreWolf is a Firefox fork, right? The quote is literally "major browser", which obviously precludes fairly niche forks.
Of course I am… and that’s the point. Librewolf is Firefox without the spyware.
But it's not a "major browser." It's a niche fork that has valuable adjustments for power users, but would be unusable for your average non-technically inclined user. I use Librewolf myself and appreciate it, but it's not something you can just drop on an older relative's machine and expect to work fine. Firefox has plenty of issues out of the box with sneaking in ads and telemetry, but at the same time you still have to understand that it's an important player in the market despite its flaws because it's the only real mainstream competitor to an entirely Chromium-based ecosystem, and despite the issues it does have, it's still lightyears ahead of Chrome.
Aren’t cookies already limited to the site at which they were created??
What the fuck? You mean to tell me sites have been sharing cookies?
I thought all browsers only delivered cookies back to the same site.
The problem is that a website is generally not served from one domain.
Put a Facebook like button on your website, it's loaded directly from Facebook servers. Now they can put a cookie on your computer with an identifier.
Now every site you visit with a Facebook like button, they know it was you. They can watch you as you move around the web.
Google does this at a larger scale. Every site with Google ads on it. Every site using Google analytics. Every site that embeds a Google map. They can stick a cookie in and know you were there.
Put a Facebook like button on your website, it's loaded directly from Facebook servers. Now they can put a cookie on your computer with an identifier.
Which is not allowed by GDPR btw, because they do that even if you don't click them. There are plenty guides online, how to create your own, not tracking, facebook like button.
I'm curious how this will affect OAuth (if at all). Does it use an offsite cookie to remember the session, or is that only created after it redirects back to the site that initiated the login?
I my experience it generally breaks it. Leveraging cookies on the auth domain is fine, but once you are redirected to another domain, that application needs to take the access and refresh tokens and manage reauthentication as a background process. Simply don't store those things as cookies though.
Yeah that's kind of what I was getting at. It's been a while since I've worked with it so I couldn't remember if it used cookies for the token exchange or some other mechanism.
ah yes, the other TCP
Maybe they should patent it, to protect their TCP IP.
Or have some higher tier version called Ultimate Cookie Protection {UDP)
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