4 ms·

Evercookies sound terrifying. Not that I'm doing anything that I really worry about hiding, but I can't stand invasion of privacy like this. Are there effectiv

by rufugee 11y ago

Evercookies sound terrifying. Not that I'm doing anything that I really worry about hiding, but I can't stand invasion of privacy like this. Are there effective protections against them? If not, I wonder why the EFF hasn't taken up the charge to fight them?

puredemo 11y ago
Too many battles to wage for one fairly small organization
- rufugee 11y ago
  Then should the rest of us not step up? Or is it that there's no effective way to combat it without making major changes to browsers we have little control over? At the very least, someone could have a website which listed steps you can take to protect yourself.
  - schoen 11y ago
    You can get some benefits from EFF's Privacy Badger and from Mozilla's Tracking Protection feature. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-fir... https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger Both of these tools are focused on cross-site ("third-party") tracking, rather than cross-session tracking by an individual site ("first-party"). Third-party tracking is technically easier to try to detect, and some people regard it as more intrusive. As I mentioned upthread, EFF's own research on browser fingerprinting shows that it's hard to stop all user tracking (because your browser and OS and device might be different enough from others to be unique in a population in ways that could be observable by a remote site). Tor Browser is doing great work on this https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#fingerprinting-linkability https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#finge... and I think they've made concrete progress. (I think the Tor Browser developers might say that the privacy benefits of using their changes without Tor are unclear because you could also so easily be tracked by IP address. But it's possible that some of their changes will find their way into mainline Firefox, at least as options.)
puredemo 11y ago
Too many battles to wage for one fairly small organization
schoen 11y ago
EFF is interested in this issue. It's one of the motivations behind our work on Panopticlick and Privacy Badger, for instance. https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger We have also participated in meetings and discussions on tracking protection and lobbied browser developers about it. The Panopticlick research shows that it's potentially difficult to impossible to detect and prevent persistent cross-site tracking in the current web platform by technical means. Even if we fixed every cookie-like mechanism so that no site can set and query state except through official HTTP cookies and subject to the user's cookie preferences, the sites might still be able to recognize the browsers by querying other navigator (and OS and plugin) properties. Tor Browser has been able to do a great job on that issue -- but at the cost of disabling a lot of web platform features that sites might expect.

by rufugee 11y ago

puredemo 11y ago

Too many battles to wage for one fairly small organization

rufugee 11y ago
Then should the rest of us not step up? Or is it that there's no effective way to combat it without making major changes to browsers we have little control over? At the very least, someone could have a website which listed steps you can take to protect yourself.
- schoen 11y ago
  You can get some benefits from EFF's Privacy Badger and from Mozilla's Tracking Protection feature. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-fir... https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger Both of these tools are focused on cross-site ("third-party") tracking, rather than cross-session tracking by an individual site ("first-party"). Third-party tracking is technically easier to try to detect, and some people regard it as more intrusive. As I mentioned upthread, EFF's own research on browser fingerprinting shows that it's hard to stop all user tracking (because your browser and OS and device might be different enough from others to be unique in a population in ways that could be observable by a remote site). Tor Browser is doing great work on this https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#fingerprinting-linkability https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#finge... and I think they've made concrete progress. (I think the Tor Browser developers might say that the privacy benefits of using their changes without Tor are unclear because you could also so easily be tracked by IP address. But it's possible that some of their changes will find their way into mainline Firefox, at least as options.)

puredemo 11y ago

Too many battles to wage for one fairly small organization

schoen 11y ago

EFF is interested in this issue. It's one of the motivations behind our work on Panopticlick and Privacy Badger, for instance. https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger We have also participated in meetings and discussions on tracking protection and lobbied browser developers about it. The Panopticlick research shows that it's potentially difficult to impossible to detect and prevent persistent cross-site tracking in the current web platform by technical means. Even if we fixed every cookie-like mechanism so that no site can set and query state except through official HTTP cookies and subject to the user's cookie preferences, the sites might still be able to recognize the browsers by querying other navigator (and OS and plugin) properties. Tor Browser has been able to do a great job on that issue -- but at the cost of disabling a lot of web platform features that sites might expect.