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Firefox browser will block the IAB's DigiTrust universal ID
- zwaps 7y ago>> Mitchell said. “They believe no third party can be trusted. We take a different position: that trust should be established directly between consumers and the brands, and publishers they trust, and with the third parties that those brands and publishers trust.” What the hell does this even mean?
- deugtniet 7y agoIt means that they don't want tracking to stop. And you should _definitely_ trust them as well as all their partners. Good on Mozilla for doing this. I want privacy when I'm on the internet, without having to resort to tor-like schemes
- weinzierl 7y agoNot good at all. I still trust Mozilla to a large degree but I definitely don't trust their partners. Mozilla needs money to operate, they need partners and they'll will have to give something to them in return for the money - that is all ok and just how things are. What is not ok is that associate so closely with shady operations like Cliqz for example.
- Majestic121 7y agoI think there's a misunderstanding : the quote above does not come from Mozilla, but from one of the Digitrust people (Mitchell) Here is the full quote : “We know certain companies (Firefox) take the position that there is no sufficient consumer value to justify ‘tracking’ — anonymous audience recognition — of any kind, not even for use in communicating privacy choices,” Mitchell said. “They believe no third party can be trusted. We take a different position: that trust should be established directly between consumers and the brands, and publishers they trust, and with the third parties that those brands and publishers trust.”
- int_ 7y agoPretty much the old tobacco tactics.
- chopin 7y agoTor-like schemes won't help you much as the tracking is done on the device.
- Timshel 7y agoYou might want to clarify that the quote is from Jordan Mitchell from IAB, not Mitchell Baker from Mozilla. I was quite perplexed at first :).
- mikedilger 7y agoTrust isn't transitive clarification: this doesn't answer your question about what he means, this is a critique of what he said.
- m712 7y agoIt's a hard to parse sentence, which is intentionally vague. It's weasel wording, basically.
- bouke 7y agoIt argues that you would _trust by proxy_. So: you trust the company (site) you're visiting, that company trusts third parties, and by proxy you trust those third parties. The problem is that most people wouldn't trust those brands in the first place if they new what shady third parties they enlist.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dingo_bat 7y agoUnsurprising that Firefox would sabotage any effort to destabilize its parent company's (Google) revenue model.
- chris_wot 7y agoI now exclusively use Firefox on MacOS. I refuse to use Chrome in any way now.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y agoI also find it that Firefox syncs better between mobile and desktop than Chrome did. So yeah, no looking back.
- a_imho 7y agoThey only differ in marketing really. I use Firefox too but have no illusions about it, Moz://a is sponsored by the same Google ad money. None of the big browser providers are good guys, there is clear conflict of interest that no amount of PR can resolve.
- chris_wot 7y agoThere are lots of things that Firefox does to enhance privacy that Chrome does not do.
- a_imho 7y agoThere are lots of things Firefox could do with little to no effort to enhance privacy if it were user focused.
- m712 7y agoThis website has a very thorough Firefox de-bloat and anti-tracking guide: https://spyware.neocities.org/guides/firefox.html https://spyware.neocities.org/guides/firefox.html I find that some of those options are excessive, but it's good for the privacy-minded in general. Just change the options based on your threat model.
- m712 7y agoYou should take the next step and switch to GNU/Linux. :o)
- draklor40 7y agoI'd be willing to pay monthly for Firefox to make for the lost advertising revenue.
- lowracle 7y agoThe only times I click on ads is to see what competing businesses are doing / offering. I am pretty sure they would actually save money by stopping showing me ads.
- chris_wot 7y agoSetup a monthly donation? https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
- ComodoHacker 7y agoYou should be paying content publishers. They are the ones who lose advertising revenue, not Mozilla.
- draklor40 7y agoMozilla makes a big chunk of money (or did) by making Big G the default search engine. They have employees to pay and servers to maimtain. Publishers online and offline have almost never made money without ads. The only diff. is tracking readers is easy online. And that is not probably going to change anytime soon. I don't trust publishers. I trust Mozilla.
- ComodoHacker 7y ago>Publishers online and offline have almost never made money without ads. Mozilla can't help with that, even if they break up with Big G. Mozilla deserves our support for other reasons though.
- edhelas 7y ago> David Kohl, CEO of ad tech company TrustX, a member of DigiTrust, said the entire cookie-based advertising infrastructure needs a rethink that involves prioritizing consumer interests, rather than ad tech’s commercial interests. Or basically just stop tracking people online ? And find another way to sell your stuff ? #thinkoutsidethebox
- dmortin 7y agoWe could also pay for all the sites we use (google, youtube, gmail, reddit, etc.), but it would be pretty pricey if you visit a lot of sites. Most people would choose tracking instead.
- creato 7y agoWe know the price for youtube + google music: $10/mo. I wonder how many people are choosing that?
- tadzik_ 7y agoWith Google being a tracking company, I expect that $10/mo gets rid of the ads but still does all the possible tracking it can – I'm not surprised if anti-tracking people don't buy into it. Product-first companies seem to be doing fine – Spotify doesn't exactly have a problem with people not wanting to pay for it.
- throwaway2048 7y agoIf anything, indicating you pay for such things makes advertising to you outside of youtube is far more valuable.
- scarejunba 7y agoCompare stock price vs. S&P500 for NYSE:SPOT and NASDAQ:GOOGL for some fun. Then realize that Spotify allows you to target ads for more fun.
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- beezischillin 7y agoYeah, no. I don’t trust the ad industry. They’ve never been honest before, I doubt they would start now.
- xg15 7y agoI've found that most press statement that contain the term "we believe" go on with some utterly ridiculous mental gymnastics to justify shady behaviour. This one is no exception: > [IAB Tech LAB svp of Membership and Operations said:] “They believe no third party can be trusted. We take a different position: that trust should be established directly between consumers and the brands, and publishers they trust, and with the third parties that those brands and publishers trust.” Question to that guy: What act specifically would establish that trust? My browser downloading JavaScript from half a dozen companies that I've never heard of? Or is their position that by opening a link to some web page, I declared my boundless, irrevocable trust in that site, all third-parties that site delegates to, all third-parties those third-parties delegate to, etc etc as infinitum? Where else in life do you get this understanding of "trust"?
- tadzik_ 7y agoI expect nothing less from someone from a company called "TrustX, a member of DigiTrust". Just like with any other scammer, when someone uses a word "trust" excessively, you know that you shouldn't. Why is the company called TrustX instead of AdX, if that's what they're dealing with? Maybe so that they appear more innocent when they show up in your browser warnings or cookie alerts? That's the kind of "trust" they're hoping to exploit.
- cocochanel 7y agoSerious question: isn't that how SSL/TLS certificates work too, by chain of trust?
- majewsky 7y agoYes, but only because every other known solution is worse in practice.
- pornel 7y agoThe infosec definition of trust is not really the same as the colloquial meaning of trust. The infosec "trust" is not something earned or even verified, but an assumption that something is not malicious. Imagine a fortress: inside of the walls is called "trusted", outside of the walls is "untrusted". So a trusted CA merely means a certificate inside your fortress' walls that an attacker can't modify.
- chopin 7y agoIf web sites are starting to track me via first-party cookies (which I allow for now) those will be banned aggressively as well. Currently I am somewhat lax on deleting them on browser close (I like to stay logged in for some sites). But this will change on a whim when this becomes mainstream.
- tadzik_ 7y agoCheck out the Cookie AutoDelete addon – it can be configured to keep cookies from select, whitelisted domains, and delete everything else every time you close a tab. You can have the cake and eat it too :)
- pmontra 7y agoI'm always more certain that we're going to see ad based web sites rendering with webassembly in a full page canvas. Some sites will implement ways to let us copy and paste text, others won't.
- m712 7y agoHeck, companies are already starting to use CNAME records to fool ad/content blockers. I don't think what you're describing is far from becoming reality.
- chopin 7y agoThis is extremely dangerous if you have session cookies and don't configure them carefully. For now, I commonly allow javascript/cookies on the top-level domain (I am a lazy uMatrix user). This will presumably change in future...
- tomp 7y agoI applaud Mozilla for taking this stance, but I think that blocking is fundamentally misguided approach. We need to start faking! Let’s fake DigiTrust IDs, convince them that it’s not blocked, and leave them none the wiser! It’s the same approach Apple should have taken with (most) iOS permissions - the app shouldn’t be able to know that it cannot access e.g. user’s GPS location, it should just be faked (i.e. random).
- cinquemb 7y agoI second this, but I doubt anyone would get the go ahead to pursue this fully (spoof canvas readouts, user agents, fonts installed, plugins installed, screen size, etc) in firefox (non addon). Would also be great if noscript functionality was built into servo/dom/netwerk modules (would be way more performant than the addon).
- padenot 7y agoFirefox already supports something like this if you go to about:config and flip `privacy.resistFingerprinting` to true. It's not finished/perfect, but changes a lot of things.
- cinquemb 7y agoYeah, I do this, but I also have alot of things compiled into my fork that it doesn't do (yet).
- gruez 7y agoMind sharing those patches?
- cinquemb 7y agoMostly related to spoofing and caching user agents from those sampled from unencrypted pub wifi connections or popular list available online and randomizing them on every http request, some stuff related to (nuking) css url calls, randomization of read outs from canva2d, removing all the stuff on the new tab pages, randomization of list of available fonts/plugins/langs/etc available. Next thing I want to do is block arbitrary http requests by default and make the list of blocked url calls available to the dom (and a way to unblock them from the UI, or config file loaded in at runtime). I'll never pass recaptcha, but idc, i installed this on my wife's computer as well and i'm starting to explore a way i can make a ios build using the recent tethered jailbreak for ios devices (besides the most recent releases). One day, It would be fun to try a prank on a day I actually go into the office and exploin a vuln in the old cisco router firmware to try to get installed on other devices on the network and see if how many people actually notice the changes and/or start using the browser because the dont get ads anymore lol
- sojmq 7y agoThat's very cute, Mozilla Corporation. When will you be blocking AdSense ads?
- Jonnax 7y agoFigure out a revenue model which allows them to be not dependant on google search revenue. Why be intentionally obtuse? I guess the next thing you might say is "Mozilla should just stick to a web browser and cancel all their other projects"
- sojmq 7y agoI've actually said that many, many times here.
- Nextgrid 7y agoIs there anything bad with focusing on a single project and doing it well instead of spreading attention on tons of different & unrelated ones especially when you’re resource-constrained? The majority of people know and appreciate Mozilla because of Firefox and Firefox alone. Their other projects are just distractions IMO.
- correct_horse 7y agoYou know you're wrong when you put scare quotes around "tracking", and instead choose to call it "anonymous audience recognition". Anonymous audience recognition ranks amoung the most useless, actively misleading jargon I've heard. To be clear, this system neither recognizes an audience nor can anything of this sort be fully anonymized. A universal ID such as this would recognize every individual member of an audience, not an audience as a whole. Recognizing an audience would look like telling an amazon seller that their product is popular with people who also bought paper towels. Such recognition would be possible from a list of transactions i.e. (paper towels, sunglasses), (energy bar), (dish soap), (laptop, paper towels). In this system there is no knowledge who made what transaction, no universal ID. Any Universal ID can't be fully anonymous because your browsing history is you. You might search for something related to your current residence, your hometown, your workplace and the breed of your dog. These searches alone would be enough to uniquely identify you already, but it would be difficult. Luckily you make boatloads of searches a day, and combining all that data would make your identity much easier to discover. This all assumes your search provider bought in to this universal id system (use DuckDuckGo).
- tialaramex 7y agoAha, the Interactive Advertising Bureau not the Internet Architecture Board. It's always hard to tell whether people think their three letter name is so distinctive nobody could mistake them for anybody else or whether such confusion is instead desirable...
- buboard 7y agoFirefox and others are good at blocking ads. But what's their replacement? What's the plan here, to starve everyone of the only viable source of income? (If you believe this is not true, try finding a way to accept micropayments to a website). The endgame here will be that sites start blocking firefox. At least Brave is trying something new.
- obenn 7y agoThe aim of this is to block tracking. I don’t believe Mozilla or anyone else has much interest in blocking ethical, contextual ads.
- sunshiney 7y agoThe majority of site ads are affiliate ads. They are being blocked. The lower income folks have been hurt tremendously already. Analytics is suffering from blocks. Math runs business decisions re spending. No math equals bad decisions. Banner ads? Ineffective but why buy when good numbers are not available. The future online belongs to big tech and gorilla business as these good intentioned decisions kill the middle and lower class online. Me? Been running biz online for nearly 3 decades. The blood online is deep and getting bigger.
- johnpowell 7y agoHonestly.. I don't understand the details anymore. I just trust that Mozilla and gorhil are doing their best. And if they can't help me nobody can.
- syshum 7y agoOfcourse, only CloudFlare gets to track FireFox users.
- aleppe7766 7y agoSadly, it’s an industry that can’t regulate itself and has been overpromising to less and less gullible clients. Unfortunately advertising is still the main revenue source for publishers, good and bad. Google, Amazon and Facebook will find a way around any but the most extreme and impractical blocking, with logins and technology at a scale that isn’t remotely feasible for all the rest of the industry. So in a way this stance is only advancing their strength at the expense of that fainter and fainter competition that’s fed with the breadcrumbs falling from the tables of the big three. Not sure if in the end we’ll consider this battle as worth fighting as many of you presently think.
- arkanciscan 7y agoSo their plan to reduce the number of tracking cookies is to introduce another tracking cookie? There's an XKCD comic about that.
- handlewithcare 7y agoYou have a link for that comic?
- 713233eb 7y agoTimeless masterpiece: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- joe5150 7y ago"Meanwhile, Google is set to make an announcement in February about how it will treat third-party cookies in Chrome." Google: our ad and analytics tracking cookies are first-party cookies if you're using chrome :)
- sunshiney 7y agoI run online biz and have since 1993. Today, I am watching the death of small biz online, the under-employed no longer able to increase income from online biz builds, the death of affiliate income, the spike of subscription paywalls, the growth of big tech as a result, the growth of sites as info brochures for retail brick mortar, decrease in content,all melded with large increases in labor costs, labor benefit bookkeeping and tax expenses,taxes due to nearly 2000 US jurisdictions. In time, you will have few sources for content online and it will be concentrated in gorillas, direct mail will and is increasing, retail will be big guys only, and the biggest losers will be the small guys. But blocks won't be needed then as big guys will deploy the Cobra phenomena as they can afford it. Loser: the average guy. Winner: the big guys. Ah well. More poor people. Ah well.