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Looking Up Symptoms Online? These Companies Are Tracking You
- DavideNL 11y agoSo i open the page and Disconnect shows 36 tracking items blocked, and uBlock shows 18 more items blocked. Awesome :)
- belorn 11y agoI use Tor browser quite often, and this is a primary reason why. I have several times thought "hmm, I should not be typing this into the search box", especially when at a work or at a public network.
- SG- 11y agoJust a reminder that uBlock now blocks Google Analytics by default as well as Addthis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919523
- dredmorbius 11y agoIs uBlock effectively an AdBlock/AdBlock+ replacement?
- oostevo 11y agoYes, though it's substantially more memory-efficient. There's a fairly detailed description of the differences here: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/wiki/What-uBlock-can-and-can-not-%28currently%29-do https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/wiki/What-uBlock-can-...
- seanp2k2 11y agoEFF PrivacyBadger + uBlock with lots of lists enabled blocks most of the tracking garbage. Sad state of affairs that basically every website is doing some kind of for-profit selling of their users.
- perdunov 11y agoGhostery found one tracker (PiwikAnalytics) that PrivacyBadger didn't on the PrivacyBadger page itself.
- mike-cardwell 11y agoI'm not sure there's much wrong with using Piwik, as long as it is self-hosted. If using Piwik is bad, then so is using Apache access logs.
- perdunov 11y ago> so is using Apache access logs. This kind of might be. Ideally, anonymous is supposed to mean collecting no data at all.
- vinceguidry 11y agoThat's just silly. It's next to impossible to provide good UX without knowing what your customers are doing on your site.
- perdunov 11y agoMy guitar has superb UX. Are you suggesting it's tracking me? (Oh my!)
- vinceguidry 11y agoTry making an Internet-connected guitar, that, say, downloads its own effects, and see how easy it remains to use.
- DavideNL 11y agoi stopped using EFF PrivacyBadger after i noticed it automatically adds cookie exceptions to Firefox which makes the SelfDestructingCookies addon useles. This 'bug' is stil not fixed at time of writing btw: https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/issues/206#issuecomment-86774536 https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox/issues/206#is... So i started using Disconnect instead...
- raverbashing 11y agoA good use for duckduckgo
- blfr 11y agoHow does DDG help here? It doesn't matter how you find the site. It's still full of third-party elements that can be used to track you.
- raverbashing 11y agoYes, but you won't be tracked by the search. (Especially by Google/Bing who know a lot about you already)
- a3n 11y agoYes, one more brick in the wall. You can't have the wall without a lot of bricks.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Maarten88 11y ago> But the chief problem is simply that just about all of the above, under current laws, is legal In the US maybe, but I would guess the business practices of most data brokers are already completely illegal in the EU. We have many laws and requirements for keeping and selling data on EU citizens. I would welcome stronger actions against these companies in the EU. But somehow I fear that enforcing EU laws on US companies is not part of the TTIP trade agreement under negotiation between US and EU.
- dzhiurgis 11y agoYeah I don't think these laws really work. IIRC just few years ago when EU stared investigating Google and asked Google where does user data come in from, Google wasn't able to answer. I don't think they are able to track it anymore.
- Symbiote 11y agoThe EU does have the requirement for websites to say they're using third-party cookies (e.g. from Google Analytics). The weakness is the poor wording chosen. "By browsing this website, you agree that a list of pages you visit will be sent to Google and ComScore" would have had a much stronger message. Perhaps follow on with "The visit to this page has already been tracked. To remove this information from Google/ComScore's servers, click here".
- magicalist 11y ago> they're using third-party cookies (e.g. from Google Analytics) Google Analytics cookies are first-party (i.e. only available to the domain of the site).
- kephra 11y agoNoScript will prevent most of those evil trackings by default. e.g. cdc.gov displays fine without any JS, and google analytics or addthis on my untrusted list anyway. Its still possible to browse without JS most of the time. Some pages are crippled by design, so disabling CSS might show the content. Others provide a escaped_fragment variant. But a stupid JS antipattern is sometimes used to display normal content with JS. One big problem are domains like ajax.google. This is often used to enhanced website, but google using it to track users. When talking about evil Google, one needs to add YT. A friend of mine once claimed: You watch a stripper, if you visit YouPorn. But you strip your privacy, if you visit YouTube.
- moogly 11y agoThe CDN from which are served popular JavaScript libraries, ajax.googleapis.com, is not tracked. It's a cookie-less domain totally separate from google.com.
- ncza 11y agoAnd they do not store IPs at all? All hops between you and them are NSA-proof?
- dredmorbius 11y agoGoogle's Blogger site is a tremendously flagrant example of this.
- netcan 11y agoI think at this stage we need to consider this a part of how the internet works. I'm far from an expert, but I do think that the majority of legislative efforts as well as many initiatives from browser makers are approaching this wrong. Privacy, as much transparency as possible and optional setting for anything that comes with a trade-off need to be built into the browser, and not as a request sent to websites. Transacting, being logged in, and certainly browsing are not inherently hindered by privacy. It's up to users (or their browser really) to demand it, in the economic sense of demand. For now, there is no cost to this kind of tracking so it happens almost by default. Moral or even legislative pressure will not have the same effect as economic pressure. The decision to protect users privacy or not needs to come with costs.
- mike-cardwell 11y agoWhen the major browser developers directly profit from being able to track users across the web, they're not going to make modifications to the way browsers work to prevent tracking. Not in any meaningful way. It's a shame so many people use Chrome. They're effectively giving an Ad company which specialises in tracking people, power to control how the web develops.
- BillFranklin 11y agoI can't understand why any company that cares about privacy would use Google Analytics over Piwik.
- Silhouette 11y agoI suspect that is an easy one. Your company might care about privacy, but not be in a technical industry or expert on these kinds of issues. Google Analytics can be set up in a few minutes by anyone who could set up their own web site in the first place. Setting up Piwik means understanding this: http://piwik.org/docs/installation-maintenance/ http://piwik.org/docs/installation-maintenance/ If you run web sites for a living, the latter is no big deal. If your company is a florist and you just learned a bit of basic HTML to write your blog about flower arranging, what's a MySQL?
- heliodor 11y ago12 years of software engineering experience here. I tried setting up Piwik for my website. Instead of showing N number of visitors, it consistently shows one or two. Tried googling, read the docs, nothing! Gave up. I have no idea why it fails so spectacularly. Google Analytics will do just fine for now until better understanding my site's visitors becomes a more valuable proposition. Right now it's not worth it.
- aw3c2 11y agoJust a reminder that https://www.torproject.org https://www.torproject.org offers a free and open-source unzip-and-run Firefox to use a anonymizing network run mostly by volunteers. Using Tor to anonymously and privately educate yourself about embarrassing or potentially ostracized problems with yourself is a great use of it. Just remember that you should not ever enter any identifying information while using it. Tor is more than fast enough for every day browsing, heck I use it to watch Youtube without major problems. I also use it to read the news, find recipes or lyrics (or similarly shady web circles) etc. If the other side does not need to know who you are and does not have to synchronize that information into a vast tracking/advertising network, why should you willingly submit it?
- andy_ppp 11y agoIf I download Tor I'll end up on one of the governments' lists. Is there a way to download it anonymously :-)
- plausibility 11y agoYou can use GetTor[1] to download it via email. If you send an email to gettor@torproject.org with the body content `windows`, `linux` or `osx`, they send you a reply with a download link to Dropbox. Then you need to verify the integrity using information they provide on their site. [1] https://www.torproject.org/projects/gettor.html https://www.torproject.org/projects/gettor.html
- unhammer 11y agoPerhaps, but it might be hard to use Tor without said government knowing that you're using Tor. If someone can see your IP connecting to torproject's IP, they can surely also see your IP connecting to a known entry node. On the other hand, it irks me that people should have to be afraid of wanting privacy. For my own part, I use Tor partly as "civil obstinacy" – if we do not exercise a right, we risk losing it. I feel it's wrong to target someone simply for using Tor / wanting privacy, and I think it should ideally be considered more normal.
- nnq 11y ago
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoThese mostly serve one-pixel GIFs; sometimes I find one-byte javascript "sources". Put these in your hosts file: 127.0.0.1 aax.amazon-adsystem.com 127.0.0.1 ad.crwdcntrl.net 127.0.0.1 b.scorecardresearch.com 127.0.0.1 gs.dailymail.co.uk 127.0.0.1 gum.criteo.com 127.0.0.1 i.dailymail.co.uk 127.0.0.1 moat.pxl.ace.advertising.com 127.0.0.1 pixel.mathtag.com 127.0.0.1 pq-direct.revsci.net 127.0.0.1 rta.dailymail.co.uk 127.0.0.1 sync.go.sonobi.com 127.0.0.1 t.dailymail.co.uk 127.0.0.1 ted.dailymail.co.uk 127.0.0.1 x.bidswitch.net 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1 www.hosted-pixel.com Search with https://www.duckduckgo.com/ https://www.duckduckgo.com/ For extra credit use DuckDuckGo's Tor Hidden Service.
- psykovsky 11y agoI very much prefer this one http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt Edit: I see some of the ones you posted are not on the file.
- eterm 11y agoYou shouldn't use loopback to block hostnames but instead use 0.0.0.0
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoI understand that 0.0.0.0 is the local subnet broadcast address. Is that really the case? I've puzzled over using 127.0.0.2. What I really want to get is an RST immediately upon sending a SYN.
- middleclick 11y agoCan you please explain why?
- userbinator 11y ago0.0.0.0 is a completely invalid destination IP, and any attempts to establish a connection to it will fail long before any packets are sent. 127.0.0.1 is still valid so you depend on the network stack to either receive a RST sent to itself, or time out. At least on Windows, the former is much faster to return with an error. It also avoids potential conflicts if you happen to need to run a server on port 80 for any reason.
- notahacker 11y agoThe original source paper is at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.1951.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.1951.pdf Much as this sort of thing makes me glad I don't need to purchase private health insurance, the article would be a lot more helpful if it distinguished more clearly between what is and isn't legal use of the data as well as between the Experians and Google Analytics of this world. That said, the original source paper probably if any thing plays down the potential concerns, contending, for example that a URI like http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21722252 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21722252 contains no symptom-specific information when any sufficiently motivated actor can write a scraper that links anonymous looking URIs on healthcare domains to conditions and symptoms referenced in the page content.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agothis sort of thing makes me glad I don't need to purchase private health insurance Are you in the USA? Thanks to Obamacare your medical history doesn't matter anymore. I purchase my own insurance and only three things matter: your age your gender the type of coverage (bronze, silver, gold, etc) It doesn't even matter whether you're single or married or have kids. My family policy cost is exactly the sum of: my policy cost based on age and gender my wife's policy cost based on age and gender each of my children's policy costs (I don't remember if age or gender matter, I don't think they do) I generally don't like the idea of Obamacare, but in this case it did a lot of good. Before Obamacare, insurance companies went out of their way to simply not offer private coverage at all to people with any medical issues, even minor ones. They can't do that anymore.
- maxerickson 11y agoThey actually can't charge different premiums based on gender (this rule took effect in 2014). They can charge tobacco users higher premiums in many states (there is a federal limit of 50% more, but states can impose a lower limit, and some do).
- hownottowrite 11y agoGhostery reports the following tracking beacons in the article itself. === Alexa Metrics ChartBeat Disqus DoubleClick eXelate Facebook Connect Google Adsense Google AJAX Search API Google Analytics Google+ Platform Krux Digital Moat NetRatings SiteCensus Neustar AdAdvisor PubMatic Quantcast Sailthru Horizon ScoreCard Research Beacon Twitter Button
- swombat 11y agoSomething about pots and kettles and the colour (or lack thereof) black...
- maxerickson 11y agoSeparation between business and editorial operations is usually construed as a positive.
- kefs 11y agoGhostery.. do yourself a favour and install it after reading this. https://www.ghostery.com/en/download https://www.ghostery.com/en/download
- scrollaway 11y agouBlock Origin + Privacy Badger covers the bases better I would say.
- lostit2xx 11y agoLooking up "fuzzy, bunny slippers" online? These companies are tracking you: ...... Oh my gosh. The same companies!
- kefka 11y agoAnd, I've found no solution regarding polluting your history with obfuscated searches. If I, Mr. Spy Provider, start seeing a single user who has every possible documentable illness, that user's search has been polluted and is worthless. So, how does one do this? Someone needs to write a search algo that pulls 100 crap medical searches for every good one. All you need to do is query the 1px image on the page. I'm guessing that could be done with 10KB/illness search for privacy pollution. Should we have to? No. But this is the reality we live in. We can use the tools to keep us from being "found", but we still are querying the server the content is on. Nothing we can do about them selling that log. But we can pollute that log.
- dredmorbius 11y agoSadly I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that fuzzing all search traffic in this manner is becoming a necessity. My concern is that it's still not sufficient. As Bruce Schneier notes, computers are exceptionally good at finding needles in haystacks, and even highly fuzzed data contains signal. That said, there are browser extensions which run random/arbitrary background Web queries.
- kefka 11y agoI would tentatively agree. Fuzzing does appear that it might work, but given the current corpus of what the spy companies have, this is probably a bad avenue of approach. Instead, lets use The Pirate Bay. We can build a scrape of WebMD and a few other places. The front page would have every disease WebMD has. And then we upload it to TPB. Highly illegal, but it does solve the problem of tracking our individual illnesses. Thoughts?
- dredmorbius 11y agoWikipedia is frequently as good, and occasionally a better reference, than WebMD or other sources (I generally prefer Mayo to WebMD which is frankly spammy as fuck). And Wikipedia's fully syndicable. Improve Wikipedia medical content, syndicate. Problem solved, laws unflouted.
- deleted 11y ago
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoBut, and I may be misunderstanding something, the page that I visit has the responsibility of serving these trackers? They call out to an adbroker, or analytics service, and they are responsible for the content surely? I mean if a newspaper prints a race hate ad for a neoNazi or FOX News runs porn adverts, they are the responsible party. So it seems we could do with strong adblocking, but more useful (given spam email still exists) more useful will be actual enforced laws. (I may be getting a bit old...)
- GhotiFish 11y agoMy government doesn't even begin to know how to deal with internet laws, the only thing I've seen come down the pipe are laws designed to protect square peg business practices in round hole environments. The only thing that can be done is to make privacy and ad blocking tools universally deployed, and let the fallout happen.
- shmerl 11y agoCheck out Mozilla Lightbeam (aka Collusion) too: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/lightbeam/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/lightbeam/
- brightsize 11y agoMy default search engine is ixquick.com . The service has a nifty proxy with a convenient proxy link next to each search result. The proxy breaks a lot of sites (JS blocking) but usually lets me see enough to determine if it's worth revisiting via Tor.
- dm2 11y agoDevil's Advocate: This data is important to public health. Search history for drugs is one of the best ways for companies, the public, and researchers to find out symptoms and the occurrence rate of symptoms. If that data is attached with location data then it gives them more pieces to the puzzle.
- yuhong 11y agoThat is why I am thinking that private health insurance that covers doctor visits are probably flawed.
- logn 11y ago... says the news site sending my data to The Nielsen Company.
- GoodIntentions 11y agoI see vice asking to load shit from 12 other domains. Which one is neilson?
- logn 11y agoimrworldwide.com ... I might have missed the rest because I block JS and 3rd party requests by default, so I only see the initial requests, not those subsequently loaded.
- decisiveness 11y agoFirefox has recently released a tracking protection feature[1] that uses Disconnect's blocklist[2]. [1]https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-fir... [2]https://disconnect.me/ https://disconnect.me/