Firefox Advances Do-Not-Track Technology 148
CowboyRobot writes "Despite strong advertising industry opposition, Mozilla is advancing plans to have the Firefox browser block, by default, many types of tracking used by numerous websites, and especially advertisers. 'We're trying to change the dynamic so that trackers behave better,' Brendan Eich, CTO of Firefox developer Mozilla, told The Washington Post. According to NetMarketShare, 21% of the world's computers run Firefox. Eich said the blocking technology, which is still being refined, will go live in the next few months. The blocking technology is based on that used by Apple's Safari browser, which blocks all third-party cookies. Advertisers use these types of cookies to track users across multiple websites. Mozilla's cookie-blocking efforts follow a Do Not Track capability being adopted by all major browsers. But the DNT effort stalled in November 2012, after advertisers stopped participating in the program, following Microsoft making DNT active by default in Internet Explorer 10. Advertisers wanted the feature to be not active by default."
girlintraining advances do not track tech MOAR. (Score:5, Interesting)
I can update my 'do not track' tech even further. It's called Tor, and the more people who use it, the safer it becomes. Bonus: Comes with free tin foil hat, extended digital middle finger to pervasive electronic surveillance.
Captcha: Doesn't work on Slashdot, which hates Tor and has banned all the exit nodes. "Slashdot is a Dice Holdings, Inc. service." *cough*
But seriously; if they can't link you to an IP address (which let's face it: with all the DNT in the world, your IP is logged by your ISP and your ISP is only too happy to whore out your realworld identity for a few scheckles, and it's trivial to link all your activity now to you, whether you login or not, use cookies, or all the browser magic in the world.
The only tech that can help you right now is one that mixes in all your traffic into everyone else's so you can't mine the data.
Re:girlintraining advances do not track tech MOAR. (Score:5, Interesting)
Good idea. There's something interesting about Tor I didn't realize before reading the the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
Originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory ... As of 2012, 80% of the Tor Project's $2M annual budget comes from the United States government, with the Swedish government
Yet the NSA takes Tor as a "definitely track this". Fact is stranger than fiction.
Re: Backlash (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, considering the various sociopathic methods that advertisers are willing to enact to get their message heard, regardless of whether the end user wants to hear it, I say fuck them. The DNT wouldn't be necessary if they were satisfied with an opt in set up or we had any idea as to who the people doing the tracking were. But, that isn't the case.
They've given us malware in ad banners that use code hosted on 3rd party sites, those annoying flash ads that cover content and randomly crash, the intellitext that randomly disrupts our browsing and not to mention those hidden ads that get activated when you click on seemingly blank space on a site.
I'd personally suggest that they made their bed, and now it's time for them to lie in it. But, I think they might take that as permission to lie to me if they're actually in bed.