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> What's a charitable reason that stops even a supposedly privacy-concerned niche browser like Brave from implementing opt-ins for these things? In my experien

by dylz 7y ago

> What's a charitable reason that stops even a supposedly privacy-concerned niche browser like Brave from implementing opt-ins for these things? In my experience, blocking these everywhere globally as a default will result in being banned from websites, trigger bullshit "fraud" invasive analytics, and all sorts of obnoxious fail-closed problems by invasive trackers. You will also be banned from most Distil-hosted sites for refusing to enable WebGL or return a canvas fingerprint. Ticketmaster, etc.

munk-a 7y ago
Sounds great - especially if chrome could roll out default blocking of it. The EU (via GDPR) made a collective decision to disallow invasive privacy, if TickTock's response to that is to ban everyone in the EU and entirely lose the market that sounds good to me - teenagers will complain and people will shrug.
- dylz 7y ago
  This is being done in EU anyway. IIRC I've seen several third party vendorssay that this type of tracking is legal under GDPR to justify 'anti fraud activities' like tracking users and sharing access to their data with other paying customers. I personally have EasyPrivacy enabled on uBlock (because these tracking scripts using canvas, webgl, etc spin up my GPU and absolutely shit all over my battery life) but they are getting more and more aggressive with first-party CNAMEs, shipping a list of dozens or hundreds of hostnames to try progressively if any are blocked (and probably honestly risk score you higher for "trying to evade them" even though it's a default uBlock list). I think it's honestly rather stupid, and I am not a fan of hearing my fans spin up for no reason accessing an otherwise plain website while it tries to open media players, try video elements, draw to canvas, download several megabytes of obfuscated garbage to evaluate.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I've worked in anti-fraud software and it isn't necessary. Fingerprinting is extremely convenient and sales loves it, but I would hope that necessity could be broken down by reasoned arguments in the EU - I'm outside of the EU and not familiar enough with GDPR but there are a number of clear and accessible counters to that point - especially if payment is involved. If payment comes into play then fingerprinting becomes irrelevant as anyone making a payment can be trusted up to the level of that payment and that payment method tied to their actions.
kbenson 7y ago
If a large enough chunk of people do it, then it becomes unfeasible to block them all. If Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer all implemented a block, it doesn't really matter that Chrome doesn't. That's ~30% of browsing traffic, and no sane company with a large web presence is going to throw away 30% of their traffic.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Agreed! There's a lot of moaning about how things should be better. Be the change you want to see. Do it. I'm always amazed at how people will complain but then let themselves be pushed around. I wonder how many people reading this article will change their or their browser's behaviour afterwards. Very few I guess.
shrimp_emoji 7y ago
Perhaps more egregiously, using a VPN gets you auto-banned from some Battlefield 4 servers. D:

by dylz 7y ago

munk-a 7y ago

Sounds great - especially if chrome could roll out default blocking of it. The EU (via GDPR) made a collective decision to disallow invasive privacy, if TickTock's response to that is to ban everyone in the EU and entirely lose the market that sounds good to me - teenagers will complain and people will shrug.

dylz 7y ago
This is being done in EU anyway. IIRC I've seen several third party vendorssay that this type of tracking is legal under GDPR to justify 'anti fraud activities' like tracking users and sharing access to their data with other paying customers. I personally have EasyPrivacy enabled on uBlock (because these tracking scripts using canvas, webgl, etc spin up my GPU and absolutely shit all over my battery life) but they are getting more and more aggressive with first-party CNAMEs, shipping a list of dozens or hundreds of hostnames to try progressively if any are blocked (and probably honestly risk score you higher for "trying to evade them" even though it's a default uBlock list). I think it's honestly rather stupid, and I am not a fan of hearing my fans spin up for no reason accessing an otherwise plain website while it tries to open media players, try video elements, draw to canvas, download several megabytes of obfuscated garbage to evaluate.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I've worked in anti-fraud software and it isn't necessary. Fingerprinting is extremely convenient and sales loves it, but I would hope that necessity could be broken down by reasoned arguments in the EU - I'm outside of the EU and not familiar enough with GDPR but there are a number of clear and accessible counters to that point - especially if payment is involved. If payment comes into play then fingerprinting becomes irrelevant as anyone making a payment can be trusted up to the level of that payment and that payment method tied to their actions.

kbenson 7y ago

If a large enough chunk of people do it, then it becomes unfeasible to block them all. If Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer all implemented a block, it doesn't really matter that Chrome doesn't. That's ~30% of browsing traffic, and no sane company with a large web presence is going to throw away 30% of their traffic.

tempguy9999 7y ago
Agreed! There's a lot of moaning about how things should be better. Be the change you want to see. Do it. I'm always amazed at how people will complain but then let themselves be pushed around. I wonder how many people reading this article will change their or their browser's behaviour afterwards. Very few I guess.

shrimp_emoji 7y ago

Perhaps more egregiously, using a VPN gets you auto-banned from some Battlefield 4 servers. D: