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What I can discern from your answer is that the specific type of tracking stopped is based on XSS and nothing else, is that right? And if that’s the case, then
by iamdamian 7y ago
What I can discern from your answer is that the specific type of tracking stopped is based on XSS and nothing else, is that right?
And if that’s the case, then if I am someone who is primary worried about being tracked by ad networks, then I don’t really need Firefox containers. Is that fair?
- gshdg 7y agoOnly if you’re confident your ad blocker blocks them effectively. Also, it isolates cookies (so for instance, Facebook can’t tell you’ve visited sites that embed its share script if you visit them in a container where you never open Facebook). But yeah, containers are about isolation more than privacy. It’s like having multiple independent browser instances (each of which has a name and remembers your state and logins and such for just its own instance, even through restarts) at once.
- iamdamian 7y agoThat makes sense, thanks. So a concrete example would be that a container would block a Google Analytics script from setting a first-party tracking cookie if, for some reason, my ad blocker weren’t already blocking that script. (My understanding is that, with third-party cookie blocking, cookies are already isolated, but not if a site has set up first-party cookie tracking. That tracking can only be blocked at the script level.) Is that about right?
- gshdg 7y agoContainers don’t block cookies. But a cookie set in one container is available only in that container, not in other containers.
- iamdamian 7y agoThat is true, although that says nothing about the ability of whoever provided the cookie to track you across containers through said cookie. I believe this is the basis for all cookie-based tracking. What I am gathering from this discussion is that containers are really not targeted at privacy as a use case, unless you have an ad blockers that isn't effectively blocking specific scripts from setting tracking cookies.
- gshdg 7y agoHow would it track you across containers with the cookie when the cookie set in one container doesn’t even exist in another?