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Intelligent Tracking Prevention
- thanksgiving 9y agoDoes this affect Google analytics?
- spiderfarmer 9y agoProbably not. Analytics sets first party cookies.
- algesten 9y agoThis is my main problem. GA loads a script that sets first party cookies. I really want Safari to have easy integration points to make a good cookie whitelist interaction using plugins. Sure it's painful the first few days having to gradually build up that list, but like little snitch, once you're passed that stage, you just set it to say no to any new domains setting cookies. Then users could cooperate to build cookie whitelists...
- bigbugbag 9y ago> This is my main problem. GA loads a script that sets first party cookies. Only when scripting is enabled.
- bigbugbag 9y agoProbably not, but hopefully at some point google analytics will be made useless and irrelevant so unethical website owner and developer will stop giving away user privacy and data to google without their consent. Hopefully the new EU law coming into effect next year will allow website visitor to sue the website owner for tracking him with google analytics without express consent and not allowing to opt out.
- _pmf_ 9y agoThe untold story here (that is, however, indirectly acknowledged by Brave) is that user tracking is required by websites to prevent being completely defrauded by ad providers / advertisers being defrauded by click bot farms. Without providing viable alternative incentives, this will just move the ad driven part of the web into closed networks (Twitter/FB) where everything is single domain. Is this really the intended outcome? (It's nice to see Brave have an effect, though.)
- ForHackernews 9y ago> user tracking is required by websites to prevent being completely defrauded by ad providers / advertisers being defrauded by click bot farms. Maybe don't pay for clicks, only pay for sales.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoHow would you keep track of the sales without cookies? Most people don't buy on the first visit.
- ForHackernews 9y agoUnless I'm misunderstanding, the technology described in the article is designed to fight against cross-site tracking (i.e. following users all over the internet to different sites) I suspect few users would object to a single web property remembering them across multiple visits.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoSo you'll have to rely on the webshop to keep track of purchases? I'd rather have a third party involved that has to keep both the publisher and the advertiser happy.
- ryan-c 9y agoThat gets defrauded via a technique called "cookie stuffing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_stuffing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_stuffing
- ThrowAway123543 9y ago...which can be stymied by using first-party cookies for lead attribution, which is exactly what webkit is recommending that sites switch to. Voila!
- matt4077 9y ago
- panic 9y agoA machine learning model is used to classify which top privately-controlled domains have the ability to track the user cross-site, based on the collected statistics. Out of the various statistics collected, three vectors turned out to have strong signal for classification based on current tracking practices: subresource under number of unique domains, sub frame under number of unique domains, and number of unique domains redirected to. What's preventing ad networks (or whoever this is meant to protect against) from gaming this system?
- ForHackernews 9y agoPresumably the model will be updated to adapt to a changing threat environment from ad networks.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoWhat prevents a tracking script to set a third party cookie first and then set a first party cookie that references the third party cookie. And when the script notices the third party cookie is gone, it sets it again on the next visit? With enough websites using it, you would only lose a couple of visits.
- mixedbit 9y agoCookies are called third party based on a context in which they are sent. A cookie itself is not third or first party, it can act as both depending on this context.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoYes, but only one of them is removed after a day.
- kodablah 9y agoI have so many questions that I'm sure will be cleared up over time. I am very happy to hear this "classification" happens on-device. I am curious how opaque it is. I assume, like the rest of WebKit the classifier is open source? In Safari, both desktop and mobile, is there a way to see which domains/cookies are blocked/purged or what the time remaining on them is (assuming I don't revisit the page)? Also, I assume this can easily be beaten be smart ad networks. "Hey, publisher, just use our JS snippet which loads your first-party cookie we may have set previously and then loads a JS URL with that identifier as a query param in the URL along with other fingerprinting info, and we may set that first-party cookie after load too." I would personally love the option to not send any third party cookies not on the same domain as the frame (or maybe an opt-in) on a per-site basis as I can only see it breaking social logins and other lazily-dev'd items like comment board integration (most SSO uses redirects anyways). Surely if a website wanted to offer its own domain's cookie store, it could (just like you can with local storage).
- a_imho 9y agoI'm running a fairly old browser here, I have the ability to set when to accept cookies/third party cookies and which sites to whitelist and to set the retain policy whatever I wish to. Also, I can add extensions like Self Destructing Cookies on a whim. To me it looks more like Overengineered Tracking Prevention to be able to shovel in 'Machine Learning Classifier' for buzzword compliance.
- throw_throw 9y agoApple is quite good are targeting the lowest common denominator; most people do not know about these settings.
- Arnt 9y agoYou can, but are you better than the classifier at actually doing? Have you done it for every web site you visited today? Besides, there is some value in getting widespread blocking. When you're the only one who blocks, that's a signal. When Apple's new doodah blocks mostly-the-right-thing for 10% of the users, that's quite different. You get to be part of a crowd.
- a_imho 9y agoI would think so, yes, mainly because I don't have to take advertisers into consideration. And I can do a lot more for my browsing experience blocking wise, much much more. Invalidation is hard. Once you accept you have to tread down the road of accepting and deleting cookies and local storage I see no reason to wait 30 days. Why not purge them right on (tab)closing?. If you really care about privacy that is. Which could have been set to be default on the next update btw.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 9y agoMy browsers are set to purge all cookies upon exit. And I typically exit at least daily.
- dzink 9y agoUnintended consequences of this will be the complete dominance in affiliate and ad networks of major consumer sites like Google, Facebook and Amazon who already own products visited daily. It also means larger focus of all ad networks to aquire consumer sites or buy redirects or hijack users somehow to get their ads to show/track. Ads and addictive sites are going to feed off of this rule.
- scarlac 9y agoAlthough your point is valid, currently, Google uses quite a lot of other domains for analytics and tracking than google.com. For analytics, some (unknown to me) things are served from google-analytics.com, and I'm seeing cookies from googlesyndication.com and doubleclick.net as well. As with many things in ML and NN, the premise of the tech is that it won't be a 100% perfect solution, but it'll hopefully be good enough or better than what you have.
- pilif 9y ago> Google uses quite a lot of other domains for analytics and tracking than google.com ... for now. It's just a matter of time before analytics and tracking will move. Just like maps has moved to google.com in order for search to also get access to the current location (which is a permission I'd gladly give to maps, but not to the search engine)
- HappyTypist 9y agoYou can disable using precise locations in Google search, and Google will no longer request your location except for when there is a maps card in the result (which makes sense)
- jstoeffler 9y agoThey can do that, but it's a delicate choice: if google.com gets flagged as a "tracker domain", the google.com cookies will be deleted after 30 days of no interaction with google.com. Probably not an issue for most of the users, but for those who don't use it very often, they'd get logged out. Not sure Google wants that.
- anilgulecha 9y agoWhy is "cookies can't be used in 3rd-party context" not turned on from day 0? Right now isn't it a cat and mouse game of holding many domains/subdomains, and passing the cookie flag across them. It seems technically possible to cancel out the protections of ITP. However, deciding cookies can never be used outside of 3rd party context may mean I have to make some additional logins to services from time to time, but have much better tracking protection. Is my assessment faulty?
- matt4077 9y ago> Why is "cookies can't be used in 3rd-party context" not turned on from day 0? It's been the long-standing default of Safari to block 3rd-party cookies. As is described in the excellent post this links to, there is some functionality that 3rd-party cookies enable that can be beneficial. They use single-sign-on as an example.
- codedokode 9y agoSingle-sign on can be implemented without third-party cookies using only redirects. That is how OpenId and OAuth work. But social network widgets (Like buttons, comment form) would break without third-party cookies.
- floatboth 9y agoIf I understand correctly, "Single sign-on" means that when you sign in at one site, you're automatically signed in at others. Like when you sign in to Gmail, you get logged in on YouTube without any extra clicks. OAuth is typically a user-initiated action, like "Sign in with GitHub" or "Sign in with your domain" (https://indieweb.org/IndieAuthProtocol https://indieweb.org/IndieAuthProtocol). Though I think SSO should be possible with OAuth — maybe with a hidden iframe that does the auth process, or something with CORS requests… Or maybe a custom redirect-based protocol would be better.
- codedokode 9y ago
- codedokode 9y agoI am surprised how complicated it is, they even use machine learning. It will look like a bug to developers when the third-party cookies will suddenly stop working without obvious reason. Why don't just block third party cookies except where it is enable by the user? I think 100% of the sites I visit use third-party cookies only for tracking. And of course this is not enough. Using a combination of an IP address and browser fingerprint allows tracking a user without any cookies. And websites can still track users if they use a redirect through an analytics website (when a user visits a site for the first time he is redirected to an analytics domain, that redirects the user back adding an identifier to URL).
- eddieh 9y agoThird-party cookies are blocked by default unless enabled by the user. This has always been the case with Safari. Always! It is the second sentence of the second paragraph of the article. > From the very beginning, we’ve defaulted to blocking third-party cookies
- codedokode 9y agoActually I am against machine learning. It only makes the debugging more difficult. There should be simple rules and not some classifier one cannot understand without a math degree.
- lawrenceyan 9y agoYou make it sound like machine learning is some kind of black box. Machine learning is a huge field and there are many analytical methods within it that can offer direct understandable insights into a process.
- SilasX 9y agoRescinding downvote to give an explanation. Yes, ML isn't magic, but that's irrelevant to the parent's point: the issue is that websites a stable "browser API" to work against so they can know what the user will send back where and when. If the user is selectively setting cookies based on the results of machine-learning some non-obvious then it becomes that much harder to debug "why didn't this part of the site remember who they were?"
- blowski 9y agoWhat's the difference between this and the EFF's Privacy Badger? It's not a complaint, as I realise the EFF wants browsers to adopt such technology natively.
- cyborgx7 9y agoI haven't been able to find such an explicit explanation of he policies Privacy Badger uses. It is all very vague machine lerning talk. I would like to see a clearer comparison as well.
- floatboth 9y agoPrivacy Badger uses simple heuristics like cookie entropy estimation, domain prevalence (how many other domains embed that domain's stuff): https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/blob/master/src/js/heuristicblocking.js https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/blob/master/src/js/h... and static block lists https://www.eff.org/files/cookieblocklist_new.txt https://www.eff.org/files/cookieblocklist_new.txt
- alwillis 9y agoMore on how Intelligent Tracking Prevention works and how it may benefit Facebook and Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14514859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14514859
- cyborgx7 9y agoI theory cookies are great. They put the choice on the user to be remembered as the same person by either sending the cookie or not. The problem is that cookies were designed intransparently leading to them being percieved as non-consensual tracking rather than as the consensual mechanism that puts the user in control they could have been. These solution feel like a makeshift stopgap workaround when I think the actual solution involves creating a way to put the user back in active control if and how a site remembers you.
- arielm 9y agoI get why this needs to exist, but it feels more complicated than it should be and that sort of “magical” decision that’s based on ML is going to confuse both web developers and web users. It might be worth it, but I don’t think it is just yet. On a side note though, it seems Apple is doubling down on making decisions for its users. This is one example, another is do not disturb when driving. These sort of features make a lot of assumption and use complex logic to decide for users, even when the users don’t need that. I think that’s concerning.
- albedoa 9y ago> On a side note though, it seems Apple is doubling down on making decisions for its users. This is one example, another is do not disturb when driving. These sort of features make a lot of assumption and use complex logic to decide for users, even when the users don’t need that. I think that’s concerning. All of the reports I'm reading say DNDWD is opt-in.
- nickjosephson 9y agoBoth of these things can be turned off in settings and DNDWD will ask you if you'd like to enable it.
- jclardy 9y agoYeah, these aren't forced decisions. The driving mode is opt-in the first time.
- om2 9y agoWe came up with a hand-coded deterministic classifié that gives similar results. Part of the reason to use ML is to enable us to adapt to changes in the web.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoTracking prevention, do not disturb when driving, iMessage communication encryption (and refusal to break it), OS encryption, and other decisions that Apple is making for its users seem quite positive. I'm not against any of these decisions. On the contrary, I think they're great! (Let's ignore developer-centric issues for the moment as we're a small fraction of their user base.) But I agree it is a concerning trend. The situation is analogous to government-mandated morals. While I might be expected to welcome legislation that enforces my beliefs on the rest of the population, I personally would prefer that the government stayed completely out of making these decisions at all, because it's only a matter of time before they make a decision that does not match my beliefs.
- dilliwal 9y agoI already disable 3rd party cookies, its always a good idea, believe me. Why I say that? 1. No retargeting adv. 2. No site-to-site tracking 3. Less chances of identifying you uniquely.
- lwlml 9y agoYou know, we put a "padlock" on the address-line for a reason. Why can't we just make it easy for anyone to inspect the persistent state associated with a website. Websites already make site-maps to tell search engines how they work, why can't websites tell end-users what data they create and use with your browser? Treat them like capabilities and let the user decide if your website gets to treat your localStorage as a stalking ground of your behavior or if they'll have to work even harder. This kind of contract can do in both ways. The user can set up a permission set to give to the website. If the website balks then the user can go somewhere else or negotiate with their own principles how much they want to be "the product."
- pdimitar 9y agoAlways wanted something like what you suggested. It would be fair to the users, hence why it's not implemented (lol).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ep103 9y agoSo is this a personal suggestionby a developer in the webkit community? I see nothing that says this has landed anywhere?
- superlupo 9y agoI've had third party cookies disabled since > 5 years and never had a real problem. I'm not convinced that such a complicated solution is necessary.
- criticabug 9y agoDoes anyone know if this break/affect affiliate networks? They use third-party cookies, I think. Any purchases after more than 24h since the click cannot be attributed to it.