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>But don't forget the good old HTTP access logs, which give you all this information anyway without having to load extra scripts. But that's my point, whole do

>But don't forget the good old HTTP access logs, which give you all this information anyway without having to load extra scripts. But that's my point, whole domains have been added to EasyList under these rules that break the entire application because the person who added it assumed it was tracking related and not part of the application. People see xhr requests which save the current timezone so the server can update calendar notifications at the right time as "tracking" and break the application entirely because of it. They see a request they don't understand and block it because "it includes the useragent". Take Google shopping for instance, an entire service shut off because "it's tracking", while Amazon or eBay or any other online shopping service isn't blocked. If you really want that blocked, I'm more than happy to not serve you! I don't want to track you if you feel that using your timezone is over the line! But when your feelings toward that are pushed to who knows how many computers and now my site is broken for a large number of users, who are now contacting me to fix it, it becomes a problem. To use an analogy, I don't have any issue with people that are allergic to peanuts. I don't want to try and force feed you peanuts, I want to make sure everyone knows I serve peanuts, and I want to give you the option of not eating at my establishment if you are allergic or simply don't like peanuts. But if you start removing my establishment from maps, and start putting road blocks in front of my building preventing others from getting in, now it's overstepped a boundary. I don't pretend to have a good answer, this isn't an easy problem to solve, but giving a handful of devs a "break this website for all adblocker users" button seems like a lot of power, and it especially hurts those who are trying to accommodate you. If I didn't care, I'd just work around it, use server logs and send them to 3rd parties, lie and actively route around your attempts to block. And I'd not only make more money, but have to deal with less issues from users... My hope is that the devs that believe these things can give more options to the user to decide for themselves and make informed decisions about the tradeoffs, rather than saying "this is bad, I blocked it for you".

gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
Why do need the user's current timezone? You say calender events. Do you really want to mess with their calender based on the latest timezone their computer reported? What if they access your site whilst on a weekend trip? Do you really want to then shift all their appointments for the next week around? I've seen people miss out on jobs because overeager software changed the interview event's timezone... As a general practice don't fiddle with peoples' data without them knowing.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  And this again is the core of the issue. In the instance I'm talking about, the app was about reminders for taking medications. Having those go off at 3am local time because you flew to Hawaii for a week doesn't do you any good. Not to mention that the app tracked and helped tune dosages and timing, and needed information like when you woke up, time of day for you, the kind if medication, and a lot more. Again, you are free to not give it, but that was a core point of the application, and trying to disable or break the application in the name of privacy is like cementing your door shut to prevent breakins. Users aren't "tricked" into having timezone information used to track them, they aren't frusturated with the timezone tracking feature, and the app was paid and had a privacy policy in place that prevented me from selling or using any of the information for advertising. And if users become frusturated with the feature, I can as the developer fix it for them. You cannot, and blocking requests that you don't understand in an app you don't use is exactly what caused all the headache in the first place. And when I went to try and get it unlocked I was met with similar hostility, and told in so many words "too bad". You don't always know better than the user, and you don't always know better than the developer. In the end, I switched domains, and since then have managed to fly under the adblocker radar. I'm no longer involved with it, so I don't know if they managed another solution without me.
  - gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
    Hm this does actually sound like a usecase for using timezone info. However. I don't think that content blockers are third parties. They are part of the user agent. The choice to use a blacklist is up to the user. It is not a third party breaking your app. It is the user themselves.
    - Klathmon 8y ago
      But it's the user using a tool to do one thing (block ads) which someone has taken to an extreme (block all requests which could potentially be used for tracking, and treats different players differently depending on sentiment in a lot of cases). To use a more controversial phrase, the "blocklist" groups are now a cartel which gets to decide which apps work and which don't, and you have no way of appealing or even reasoning with them in a lot of cases. They get to decide that the Amazon cookie is okay, but a Google font is not, that login-with-facebook isn't allowed, but login-with-twitter is okay. That my app which uses timezone information was crossing a line, but my competitor wasn't. I'm more than happy to help work with those who want to protect their privacy. I genuinely agree with a lot of viewpoints and I work to protect my own privacy as well, but at some point things go too far and I feel a lot of these tools are throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, and are even causing a false sense of security as people think they are protected from everything when really they are hurting the good actors the worst while the bad actors continue to operate just fine.
pjc50 8y ago
Fundamentally it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma situation, but with three actors. The relationship between website developers and adblock developers is necessarily adversarial - adblockers only exist because users disagree with the developers how the website should appear. > start putting road blocks in front of my building preventing others from getting in It's more like you've erected a billboard, and the Campaign Against Ugly Billboards have given some people AR glasses which edit out the billboard .. and a bit more of your storefront. It's not really in the same category as fraudulent Yelp reviews. > If you really want that blocked, I'm more than happy to not serve you! I think you'd be better off just accepting this. The user and their user-agent has a "right" to display a website how they want, including in ways that the developer didn't think of - and including ways that are broken. The user can break your site if they want. I appreciate that this causes problems when they've not realised that it's their choices that break it, or put in annoying requests ("why doesn't this site work in Lynx"). But fundamentally they're customers, customers are always annoying. Given your context of a paid app it sounds like it's worth asking them to disable the adblocker pre-emptively, but presumably you've tried that already and they haven't. > Take Google shopping for instance, an entire service shut off because "it's tracking", while Amazon or eBay or any other online shopping service isn't blocked ublock Origin blocks bits of Amazon within the website - the internal sponsored advertising. I only noticed when some of it flashed up and then vanished.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  >It's more like you've erected a billboard, and the Campaign Against Ugly Billboards have given some people AR glasses which edit out the billboard .. and a bit more of your storefront. It's not really in the same category as fraudulent Yelp reviews. But your analogy misses a key aspect which is that the adblocker breaks the app entirely. It's not like just hiding my storefront, it's preventing users from entering the store at all unless they completely disable the device. Often those same users don't realize that these blocklist update silently in the background and it's their adblocker that is breaking the application that they have been using every day for years. > I think you'd be better off just accepting this. I think I worded that poorly. I do accept this. If you don't want to use an aspect, or want to render something your own way, I'm happy to let you! But I'm not happy when you start imposing those restrictions on others who don't know it's happening and don't know why core aspects of the app aren't working. Informed decisions are good, blanket disabling or breaking applications because a developer "knows better" isn't. Useragent issues I can work around, bugs can be fixed, and those who don't want that part of the app to work are happy. But I can't work around an adblocker blocking things for users that don't want then blocked. If I work around it I'm then "tracking" those who are attempting to block it (and IMO should be called out for it), and if I do nothing I lose users and paying customers who will move to competitors which for some reason are not blocked. (And I don't blame them, my app doesn't work, so why would you stick with it?) > ublock Origin blocks bits of Amazon within the website But back a year or so ago, it blocked the entire google.com/shopping URL, and the shopping.google.com subdomain (I haven't checked if it still does). The entire service blocked because someone somewhere decided it wasn't worth it, but Amazon and eBay and AliExpress all only have some elements blocked because it's somehow different. And while you can go in and re-enable those parts, it takes a long time and a good amount of technical know how of things like globbing and regex to whitelist it correctly. And then must be repeated on every device you use.

gdfasfklshg4 8y ago

Why do need the user's current timezone? You say calender events. Do you really want to mess with their calender based on the latest timezone their computer reported? What if they access your site whilst on a weekend trip? Do you really want to then shift all their appointments for the next week around? I've seen people miss out on jobs because overeager software changed the interview event's timezone... As a general practice don't fiddle with peoples' data without them knowing.

Klathmon 8y ago
And this again is the core of the issue. In the instance I'm talking about, the app was about reminders for taking medications. Having those go off at 3am local time because you flew to Hawaii for a week doesn't do you any good. Not to mention that the app tracked and helped tune dosages and timing, and needed information like when you woke up, time of day for you, the kind if medication, and a lot more. Again, you are free to not give it, but that was a core point of the application, and trying to disable or break the application in the name of privacy is like cementing your door shut to prevent breakins. Users aren't "tricked" into having timezone information used to track them, they aren't frusturated with the timezone tracking feature, and the app was paid and had a privacy policy in place that prevented me from selling or using any of the information for advertising. And if users become frusturated with the feature, I can as the developer fix it for them. You cannot, and blocking requests that you don't understand in an app you don't use is exactly what caused all the headache in the first place. And when I went to try and get it unlocked I was met with similar hostility, and told in so many words "too bad". You don't always know better than the user, and you don't always know better than the developer. In the end, I switched domains, and since then have managed to fly under the adblocker radar. I'm no longer involved with it, so I don't know if they managed another solution without me.
- gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
  Hm this does actually sound like a usecase for using timezone info. However. I don't think that content blockers are third parties. They are part of the user agent. The choice to use a blacklist is up to the user. It is not a third party breaking your app. It is the user themselves.
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    But it's the user using a tool to do one thing (block ads) which someone has taken to an extreme (block all requests which could potentially be used for tracking, and treats different players differently depending on sentiment in a lot of cases). To use a more controversial phrase, the "blocklist" groups are now a cartel which gets to decide which apps work and which don't, and you have no way of appealing or even reasoning with them in a lot of cases. They get to decide that the Amazon cookie is okay, but a Google font is not, that login-with-facebook isn't allowed, but login-with-twitter is okay. That my app which uses timezone information was crossing a line, but my competitor wasn't. I'm more than happy to help work with those who want to protect their privacy. I genuinely agree with a lot of viewpoints and I work to protect my own privacy as well, but at some point things go too far and I feel a lot of these tools are throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, and are even causing a false sense of security as people think they are protected from everything when really they are hurting the good actors the worst while the bad actors continue to operate just fine.

pjc50 8y ago

Fundamentally it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma situation, but with three actors. The relationship between website developers and adblock developers is necessarily adversarial - adblockers only exist because users disagree with the developers how the website should appear. > start putting road blocks in front of my building preventing others from getting in It's more like you've erected a billboard, and the Campaign Against Ugly Billboards have given some people AR glasses which edit out the billboard .. and a bit more of your storefront. It's not really in the same category as fraudulent Yelp reviews. > If you really want that blocked, I'm more than happy to not serve you! I think you'd be better off just accepting this. The user and their user-agent has a "right" to display a website how they want, including in ways that the developer didn't think of - and including ways that are broken. The user can break your site if they want. I appreciate that this causes problems when they've not realised that it's their choices that break it, or put in annoying requests ("why doesn't this site work in Lynx"). But fundamentally they're customers, customers are always annoying. Given your context of a paid app it sounds like it's worth asking them to disable the adblocker pre-emptively, but presumably you've tried that already and they haven't. > Take Google shopping for instance, an entire service shut off because "it's tracking", while Amazon or eBay or any other online shopping service isn't blocked ublock Origin blocks bits of Amazon within the website - the internal sponsored advertising. I only noticed when some of it flashed up and then vanished.

Klathmon 8y ago
>It's more like you've erected a billboard, and the Campaign Against Ugly Billboards have given some people AR glasses which edit out the billboard .. and a bit more of your storefront. It's not really in the same category as fraudulent Yelp reviews. But your analogy misses a key aspect which is that the adblocker breaks the app entirely. It's not like just hiding my storefront, it's preventing users from entering the store at all unless they completely disable the device. Often those same users don't realize that these blocklist update silently in the background and it's their adblocker that is breaking the application that they have been using every day for years. > I think you'd be better off just accepting this. I think I worded that poorly. I do accept this. If you don't want to use an aspect, or want to render something your own way, I'm happy to let you! But I'm not happy when you start imposing those restrictions on others who don't know it's happening and don't know why core aspects of the app aren't working. Informed decisions are good, blanket disabling or breaking applications because a developer "knows better" isn't. Useragent issues I can work around, bugs can be fixed, and those who don't want that part of the app to work are happy. But I can't work around an adblocker blocking things for users that don't want then blocked. If I work around it I'm then "tracking" those who are attempting to block it (and IMO should be called out for it), and if I do nothing I lose users and paying customers who will move to competitors which for some reason are not blocked. (And I don't blame them, my app doesn't work, so why would you stick with it?) > ublock Origin blocks bits of Amazon within the website But back a year or so ago, it blocked the entire google.com/shopping URL, and the shopping.google.com subdomain (I haven't checked if it still does). The entire service blocked because someone somewhere decided it wasn't worth it, but Amazon and eBay and AliExpress all only have some elements blocked because it's somehow different. And while you can go in and re-enable those parts, it takes a long time and a good amount of technical know how of things like globbing and regex to whitelist it correctly. And then must be repeated on every device you use.