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I'm not an expert in the field, but my understanding is that you can be (partially?) fingerprinted based on the ads you (fail to) download. I also believe such

I'm not an expert in the field, but my understanding is that you can be (partially?) fingerprinted based on the ads you (fail to) download. I also believe such partially discriminating information can be combined with other patterns (time at which you connect, sites visited, etc) to compromise your privacy. I have no idea if this is problematic in practice, though.

Santosh83 10y ago
Considering that Tor Browser users would also on the whole want to probably filter ads to improve their already slow latency, I'm hoping the Tor and µBlock devs can get together and standardise µBlock on all Tor Browsers with a preselected list of filters, which should reduce the ability to fingerprint by analysing the downloads of ads, at least within the set of all Tor Browser users.
- Jarwain 10y ago
  There's actually a ticket up currently to do exactly that, integrate uBlock on the default Tor install. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17569 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17569
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  > µBlock Just 'uBlock Origin'. You are probably mixing up the names of µTorrent and uBlock Origin.
  - jdeibele 10y ago
    I, like Santosh83, remember seeing uBlock or uBlock Origin written with the µ. Can't find it on either of their Github sites now, though.
  - Santosh83 10y ago
    Nope. But I did mean uBlock Origin and instead hastily left out the "Origin" part of its name, which can lead to confusion with the uBlock extension maintained by another developer. Most people though seem to prefer uBlock Origin and that's what I use too. The spellings uBlock and µBlock seem to be used interchangeably on different pages and sites although undeniably uBlock seems by far the commoner variant.
  - Sephr 10y ago
    The u in uBlock stands for micro (µ).
subliminalpanda 10y ago
That makes logical sense, thanks.
imaginenore 10y ago
How can anybody track which ads you failed to download? TOR browser has Noscript on by default, as far as I remember.
- themartorana 10y ago
  It's very easy to correlate UUID-stamped page load with no matching ad load on the backend, no script/flash support needed. If you have the most basic cookie support its even easier to correlate multiple ad blocks across numerous page loads, across sites.
- street 10y ago
  Your traffic to websites goes trough a fixed "circuit" (that changes every few minutes). Within a circuit, the exit node sees all outbound connections you make, or don't make.

Santosh83 10y ago

Considering that Tor Browser users would also on the whole want to probably filter ads to improve their already slow latency, I'm hoping the Tor and µBlock devs can get together and standardise µBlock on all Tor Browsers with a preselected list of filters, which should reduce the ability to fingerprint by analysing the downloads of ads, at least within the set of all Tor Browser users.

Jarwain 10y ago
There's actually a ticket up currently to do exactly that, integrate uBlock on the default Tor install. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17569 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17569
Freak_NL 10y ago
> µBlock Just 'uBlock Origin'. You are probably mixing up the names of µTorrent and uBlock Origin.
- jdeibele 10y ago
  I, like Santosh83, remember seeing uBlock or uBlock Origin written with the µ. Can't find it on either of their Github sites now, though.
- Santosh83 10y ago
  Nope. But I did mean uBlock Origin and instead hastily left out the "Origin" part of its name, which can lead to confusion with the uBlock extension maintained by another developer. Most people though seem to prefer uBlock Origin and that's what I use too. The spellings uBlock and µBlock seem to be used interchangeably on different pages and sites although undeniably uBlock seems by far the commoner variant.
- Sephr 10y ago
  The u in uBlock stands for micro (µ).

subliminalpanda 10y ago

That makes logical sense, thanks.

imaginenore 10y ago

How can anybody track which ads you failed to download? TOR browser has Noscript on by default, as far as I remember.

themartorana 10y ago
It's very easy to correlate UUID-stamped page load with no matching ad load on the backend, no script/flash support needed. If you have the most basic cookie support its even easier to correlate multiple ad blocks across numerous page loads, across sites.
street 10y ago
Your traffic to websites goes trough a fixed "circuit" (that changes every few minutes). Within a circuit, the exit node sees all outbound connections you make, or don't make.