4 ms·

The next step is not knowing where your visitors are coming from and having to only buy google ads rather then creating affiliate relationships. It is too bad

by gscott 6y ago

The next step is not knowing where your visitors are coming from and having to only buy google ads rather then creating affiliate relationships. It is too bad FireFox is playing into this, it is not helping anyone's privacy. It only lines Google's pockets.

Dylan16807 6y ago
Using and needing the exact url to form an affiliate relationship sounds like a very rare situation. And I don't know how you can say it doesn't help privacy with a straight face.
- gscott 6y ago
  It makes total sense that you have a website but have no idea where people are coming from to get to it. Why know what is working for your website so that you can improve upon it?
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    No idea?? You know the domain, which is usually enough by itself. And 99% of the time you can quickly search the domain to find what links to you.
    - gscott 6y ago
      So then there is no reason to remove most of the referrer. Because you have an ip address, url, and the ability to probably find the rest of the url. I would prefer to have the whole url and no ip address because a users ip address is useless to me while the url with the link on it is valuable. So they are taking away the wrong thing.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        It depends on how the site is laid out. Sometimes the url has information that shouldn't be shared, and truncating the url fixes that with very little downside. And it would be nice if IP addresses could be hidden but that's a very different topic.
        gscott 6y ago
        Then you would cut off the querystring. Removing the querystring would chop off any sessionID making it impossible to log back in.
fragileone 6y ago
Affiliates can still use things like personalised discount codes, script-based tracking, etc. There's still numerous ways for affiliates to exist.
acdha 6y ago
You’ll still know the site sending traffic your way, but not the exact page or query. For most affiliates that’s fine and sites like HN could set the Referrer-Policy header to allow sending page-level details since they know that they don’t include anything sensitive. What the changed default does is mean that things fail safely when someone doesn’t think about this at all and builds a site with sensitive info in the URL. In that case, outbound link targets might receive things like usernames or email addresses, information in URL path components, etc. which isn’t intended to be public. Those sites are often poorly supported so the default changing means that the work shifts to a fraction of the web community which is best prepared to deal with the trivial extra work required to set a policy.

by gscott 6y ago

Dylan16807 6y ago

Using and needing the exact url to form an affiliate relationship sounds like a very rare situation. And I don't know how you can say it doesn't help privacy with a straight face.

gscott 6y ago
It makes total sense that you have a website but have no idea where people are coming from to get to it. Why know what is working for your website so that you can improve upon it?
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  No idea?? You know the domain, which is usually enough by itself. And 99% of the time you can quickly search the domain to find what links to you.
  - gscott 6y ago
    So then there is no reason to remove most of the referrer. Because you have an ip address, url, and the ability to probably find the rest of the url. I would prefer to have the whole url and no ip address because a users ip address is useless to me while the url with the link on it is valuable. So they are taking away the wrong thing.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      It depends on how the site is laid out. Sometimes the url has information that shouldn't be shared, and truncating the url fixes that with very little downside. And it would be nice if IP addresses could be hidden but that's a very different topic.
      - gscott 6y ago
        Then you would cut off the querystring. Removing the querystring would chop off any sessionID making it impossible to log back in.

fragileone 6y ago

Affiliates can still use things like personalised discount codes, script-based tracking, etc. There's still numerous ways for affiliates to exist.

acdha 6y ago

You’ll still know the site sending traffic your way, but not the exact page or query. For most affiliates that’s fine and sites like HN could set the Referrer-Policy header to allow sending page-level details since they know that they don’t include anything sensitive. What the changed default does is mean that things fail safely when someone doesn’t think about this at all and builds a site with sensitive info in the URL. In that case, outbound link targets might receive things like usernames or email addresses, information in URL path components, etc. which isn’t intended to be public. Those sites are often poorly supported so the default changing means that the work shifts to a fraction of the web community which is best prepared to deal with the trivial extra work required to set a policy.