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Tracking can be done with <img> tags and (recently) with CSS.

• hedora 9y ago
  The idea is that everything would run through a normalizing presentation layer (like the PDF converter and RSS full text services do), and only the information needed for rendering would be sent to the client, so <img> would be rewritten to some other url and served by the proxy. The main problem I see is that you can embed trackers in the link URLs. (You probably want the proxy to be a stateless cache shared by many users, which prevents tracker stuff from persisting in whatever rendering engine it uses for the conversion)
  • k1m 9y ago
    Thank you for the kind words. We haven't really thought much about running this kind of thing as a proxy service, or what it would be like to implement it. Our tools are really intended for web articles, so they will fail on lots of other kinds of content you'll encounter in day-to-day browsing. If the intention is to avoid trackers, the proxy will have to handle everything, and not everything will be web articles. Browser extensions might be best here.
    • hedora 9y ago
      For my personal browsing habits it wouldn’t be so bad. Basically, I just check a few news aggregators (like HN) and sites that have rss feeds anyway, so support for HN would get me most of the way there. I’m not sure how many news aggregators are in common use, but I’d guess covering a dozen would get most of the addressible market. Thanks for the response!