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> Unfortunately, this was implemented in Firefox years ago but disabled due to a fear-mongering campaign by some self-styled privacy advocates who were quite vo

by nly 12y ago

> Unfortunately, this was implemented in Firefox years ago but disabled due to a fear-mongering campaign by some self-styled privacy advocates who were quite vocal in sharing their misunderstanding of web privacy What 'misunderstanding'? I don't want people knowing what third party links I'm clicking on. There's no misunderstanding. I understand it perfectly. I just don't want it. I disable 3rd party HTTP referers as well (using the RefControl extension). Sure it's not the only way sites can implement this behaviour, and I'm glad an official way exists... but only so Google will use it and then I can disable it. The argument against having an off switch is basically 'well, they're going to fuck you anyway, so bend over and here's some lube'. You say 'some self-styled privacy advocates' are fear-mongering, well its because webheads keep implementing insanely harmful features and aren't actively making the web better for the privacy concious. They (we, I guess) are grossly under-served. The response to link tracking should be "Hmm, how can we have websites ask for this permission, and shut down all these nasty means of doing it?" not "oh boy, these people are tracking people in an ugly way, how can we make this fast?". But guess which one is actually a hard problem. Do you suppose that most everyday users know (not suspect, but know) that Google are watching every link they click on? A technologically illiterate user base cannot consent.

quonn 12y ago
I think the point is that tracking already is possible, but the proposed solution was technically cleaner. So there are not new privacy problems.
- nly 12y ago
  There are. It means there are now N+1 instead of N things to worry about for those of us that actually do care. It signals an acceptance that this is something to be encouraged and welcomed. All behind users backs.
  - taf2 12y ago
    I think your logic is flawed - a ping would/is extremely easy to disable via a brower extension- a redirect url is not
logicallee 12y ago
why don't you download the internet and run grep, then you don't have to leak your search terms. Seriously - why would you want Google to know what search terms you're using? Why would anyone want to pass this information to an untrusted third party? As for me, I think once a site has seen my exact search term, knowing which of the results I'm clicking on is a small leak and quite useful so that the popular results can be put at the top.
- nly 12y ago
  So when I google 'suicide' it's OK for Google to know whether I'm clicking on the Samaritans or the Wikipedia article? And when I Google 'rape' it's OK for Google to know whether I click on a news article about a string of recent rapes or click through to rape fetish erotica website? Not everything is black or white.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    The main argument here is, they already know which you click on. They use referral links. So that's not a sensible reason to prohibit the "ping" attribute. Given two solutions with equal potential for abuse, why not pick the technically superior solution?
    - nly 12y ago
      > Given two solutions with equal potential for abuse, why not pick the technically superior solution? Straw man. You're presupposing the existence of 'ping'. The argument is why, given an observation that web features X and Y are being used to implement contentious function Z, would you want to implement a brand new, even more insidious, web feature, designed solely for doing Z, in the first place? Technical superiority of the new implementation of Z is not in dispute. > they already know which you click on. I'm pretty confident that they don't in my case.
      - phpnode 12y ago
        > I'm pretty confident that they don't in my case. Would you mind sharing the details of how you achieve this?
crystaln 12y ago
In theory, centralizing such requests with a ping should make it much easier for a browser to disable the pings, so if anything this improves security. Of course, if Google wanted to detect the lack of clicks from a given user and fall back to redirection, they could, in which case the net benefit and harm for security would be zero. As others have said, there is no way to prevent Google from gathering this information, so adding the capability to a browser doesn't change the situation.
crazy1van 12y ago
I am all for privacy and am a daily user of encrypted email and encrypted chat. However, I think there are some activities that the very privacy minded need to accept that they simply cannot participate in and maintain complete privacy. Search is one of these. In order for search to work, the user has to send a query to a third party. The third party has to be able to read the query to do the search. If that's not an acceptable loss of privacy, then don't use search.
- chii 12y ago
  the argument here is that the search engine should not be privy to which result you selected.
  - malthaus 12y ago
    so how are they supposed to improve/tune search results? that's the first metric i'd like to know.
  - cmdkeen 12y ago
    Then use a search engine which offers that functionality. You'll probably find the results are worse than Google.
acdha 12y ago
> What 'misunderstanding'? I don't want people knowing what third party links I'm clicking on. There's no misunderstanding. I understand it perfectly. I just don't want it. This is exactly what I was talking about: the misunderstanding is thinking that your outrage changes the privacy situation in any way. The options on offer are “Stop using Google” or “Let Google collect data about the search results you click on”; redirect scripts, <a ping> and Beacon are all simply implementation details for the latter option. If you feel strongly about this contact your politicians and lobby for privacy laws restricting the data companies are allowed to collect. There's approximately zero chance that everyone will voluntarily stop measuring how well their search ranking algorithms work.
- ksk 12y ago
  Disabling all the JS crap that modern sites layer on top of content - reduces memory and CPU usage. I paid for the memory and CPU, and I don't want several hundreds of MBs spent caching JS interpreter/optimizer data structures and analytics scripts wasting my CPU compute power - decreasing the battery life of my device. While you may be right that the privacy angle is something that few users care about, there are real tangible benefits to disabling some of this stuff.
  - magicalist 12y ago
    That's fine but not especially relevant to the GP's point. The Google redirect and <a ping> don't require JavaScript.
    - ksk 12y ago
      Ah okay, I didn't know that. I thought that Google returned direct links when you disabled JS.
      - magicalist 12y ago
        Yeah, it appears that they both add and remove the direct links in JS, so with JS disabled you never see the direct link (at least, that's what I get when I disable javascript).

by nly 12y ago

quonn 12y ago

I think the point is that tracking already is possible, but the proposed solution was technically cleaner. So there are not new privacy problems.

nly 12y ago
There are. It means there are now N+1 instead of N things to worry about for those of us that actually do care. It signals an acceptance that this is something to be encouraged and welcomed. All behind users backs.
- taf2 12y ago
  I think your logic is flawed - a ping would/is extremely easy to disable via a brower extension- a redirect url is not

logicallee 12y ago

why don't you download the internet and run grep, then you don't have to leak your search terms. Seriously - why would you want Google to know what search terms you're using? Why would anyone want to pass this information to an untrusted third party? As for me, I think once a site has seen my exact search term, knowing which of the results I'm clicking on is a small leak and quite useful so that the popular results can be put at the top.

nly 12y ago
So when I google 'suicide' it's OK for Google to know whether I'm clicking on the Samaritans or the Wikipedia article? And when I Google 'rape' it's OK for Google to know whether I click on a news article about a string of recent rapes or click through to rape fetish erotica website? Not everything is black or white.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  The main argument here is, they already know which you click on. They use referral links. So that's not a sensible reason to prohibit the "ping" attribute. Given two solutions with equal potential for abuse, why not pick the technically superior solution?
  - nly 12y ago
    > Given two solutions with equal potential for abuse, why not pick the technically superior solution? Straw man. You're presupposing the existence of 'ping'. The argument is why, given an observation that web features X and Y are being used to implement contentious function Z, would you want to implement a brand new, even more insidious, web feature, designed solely for doing Z, in the first place? Technical superiority of the new implementation of Z is not in dispute. > they already know which you click on. I'm pretty confident that they don't in my case.
    - phpnode 12y ago
      > I'm pretty confident that they don't in my case. Would you mind sharing the details of how you achieve this?

crystaln 12y ago

In theory, centralizing such requests with a ping should make it much easier for a browser to disable the pings, so if anything this improves security. Of course, if Google wanted to detect the lack of clicks from a given user and fall back to redirection, they could, in which case the net benefit and harm for security would be zero. As others have said, there is no way to prevent Google from gathering this information, so adding the capability to a browser doesn't change the situation.

crazy1van 12y ago

I am all for privacy and am a daily user of encrypted email and encrypted chat. However, I think there are some activities that the very privacy minded need to accept that they simply cannot participate in and maintain complete privacy. Search is one of these. In order for search to work, the user has to send a query to a third party. The third party has to be able to read the query to do the search. If that's not an acceptable loss of privacy, then don't use search.

chii 12y ago
the argument here is that the search engine should not be privy to which result you selected.
- malthaus 12y ago
  so how are they supposed to improve/tune search results? that's the first metric i'd like to know.
- cmdkeen 12y ago
  Then use a search engine which offers that functionality. You'll probably find the results are worse than Google.

acdha 12y ago

> What 'misunderstanding'? I don't want people knowing what third party links I'm clicking on. There's no misunderstanding. I understand it perfectly. I just don't want it. This is exactly what I was talking about: the misunderstanding is thinking that your outrage changes the privacy situation in any way. The options on offer are “Stop using Google” or “Let Google collect data about the search results you click on”; redirect scripts, <a ping> and Beacon are all simply implementation details for the latter option. If you feel strongly about this contact your politicians and lobby for privacy laws restricting the data companies are allowed to collect. There's approximately zero chance that everyone will voluntarily stop measuring how well their search ranking algorithms work.

ksk 12y ago
Disabling all the JS crap that modern sites layer on top of content - reduces memory and CPU usage. I paid for the memory and CPU, and I don't want several hundreds of MBs spent caching JS interpreter/optimizer data structures and analytics scripts wasting my CPU compute power - decreasing the battery life of my device. While you may be right that the privacy angle is something that few users care about, there are real tangible benefits to disabling some of this stuff.
- magicalist 12y ago
  That's fine but not especially relevant to the GP's point. The Google redirect and <a ping> don't require JavaScript.
  - ksk 12y ago
    Ah okay, I didn't know that. I thought that Google returned direct links when you disabled JS.
    - magicalist 12y ago
      Yeah, it appears that they both add and remove the direct links in JS, so with JS disabled you never see the direct link (at least, that's what I get when I disable javascript).