6 ms·

The Panopticon approach of "I am entitled to everything about you and your browsing activity because I technically CAN get it" is very troublesome and I'm glad

by gergles 12y ago

The Panopticon approach of "I am entitled to everything about you and your browsing activity because I technically CAN get it" is very troublesome and I'm glad that µblock takes a small step to revert that. If some guy followed you around a store with a clipboard literally writing down microsecond-level details of your time spent in the store, you wouldn't be OK with that just because "I promise I didn't write down your name!" There's no reason to suffer LESS privacy online.

bhouston 12y ago
uBlock's philosophy is to, by default, block crash reporters (bugsnag, newrelic) and all forms of analytics (customer.io, optimizely, kissmetrics, mixpanel, newrelic, pingdom, piwik) because it can. This is a stupid policy that hurts independent website developers because now I have to write my own version of these tools because if I use third-party services they will be listed in uBlock and blocked by default. It is stupid but these are not used to run ad-networks, but rather improve the quality of the website you are on.
- _f71y 12y ago
  You could always respect your users and continue using Google Analytics etc. knowing that some of your users won't be tracked. Does missing out on the few people who use these tools actually have a meaningful effect on your ability to run your business? I understand how the crash reporters help you but do you really need Optimizely/Analytics/MixPanel etc. running on 100% of your client browsers?
  - bhouston 12y ago
    uBlock is going to become very very popular. It isn't just going to be a small percentage of users. It is going to be the majority of tech savvy users. That is the problem. ublock isn't Ghostery or NoScript. It is being sold to most has an ad blocker, but really it blocks everything.
    - MrTortoise 12y ago
      wait so now your saying that ublock will be used by lots of people who presumably know what it does and therefore you are saying that they are wrong? IF you want to track my data you should be asking me.
    - gorhill 12y ago
      > ublock [...] is being sold to most has an ad blocker, but really it blocks everything. This is the first sentence on the project page: > µBlock is not an ad blocker; it's a general-purpose blocker. And toward the end: > Free. Open source. For users by users. No donations sought. It's not "being sold".
      - bhouston 12y ago
        >> ublock [...] is being sold to most has an ad blocker, but really it blocks everything. > It's not "being sold". See definition #7 here of "sold": http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sold http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sold "to cause to be accepted, especially generally or widely" And it is, especially when all comparisons are with AdBlock Plus -- people are being told by you that uBlock is a faster, more efficient alternative to ABP: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-efficiency-compared https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-...
- mercer 12y ago
  Are any of these blocked services self-hosted? I sort-of agree with you if that is the case, but otherwise I'd say that it's entirely fair that a user use uBlock to keep these third parties from tracking their behavior.

by gergles 12y ago

bhouston 12y ago

uBlock's philosophy is to, by default, block crash reporters (bugsnag, newrelic) and all forms of analytics (customer.io, optimizely, kissmetrics, mixpanel, newrelic, pingdom, piwik) because it can. This is a stupid policy that hurts independent website developers because now I have to write my own version of these tools because if I use third-party services they will be listed in uBlock and blocked by default. It is stupid but these are not used to run ad-networks, but rather improve the quality of the website you are on.

_f71y 12y ago
You could always respect your users and continue using Google Analytics etc. knowing that some of your users won't be tracked. Does missing out on the few people who use these tools actually have a meaningful effect on your ability to run your business? I understand how the crash reporters help you but do you really need Optimizely/Analytics/MixPanel etc. running on 100% of your client browsers?
- bhouston 12y ago
  uBlock is going to become very very popular. It isn't just going to be a small percentage of users. It is going to be the majority of tech savvy users. That is the problem. ublock isn't Ghostery or NoScript. It is being sold to most has an ad blocker, but really it blocks everything.
  - MrTortoise 12y ago
    wait so now your saying that ublock will be used by lots of people who presumably know what it does and therefore you are saying that they are wrong? IF you want to track my data you should be asking me.
  - gorhill 12y ago
    > ublock [...] is being sold to most has an ad blocker, but really it blocks everything. This is the first sentence on the project page: > µBlock is not an ad blocker; it's a general-purpose blocker. And toward the end: > Free. Open source. For users by users. No donations sought. It's not "being sold".
    - bhouston 12y ago
      >> ublock [...] is being sold to most has an ad blocker, but really it blocks everything. > It's not "being sold". See definition #7 here of "sold": http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sold http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sold "to cause to be accepted, especially generally or widely" And it is, especially when all comparisons are with AdBlock Plus -- people are being told by you that uBlock is a faster, more efficient alternative to ABP: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-efficiency-compared https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-...
mercer 12y ago
Are any of these blocked services self-hosted? I sort-of agree with you if that is the case, but otherwise I'd say that it's entirely fair that a user use uBlock to keep these third parties from tracking their behavior.