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Firefox 's Ping Attribute: Useful or Spyware?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wear-your-foil-hats dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Mozilla Team has quietly enabled a new feature in Firefox that parses 'ping' attributes to anchor tags in HTML. Now links can have a 'ping' attribute that contains a list of servers to notify when you click on a link. Although link tracking has been done using redirects and Javascript, this new "feature" allows notification of an unlimited and uncontrollable number of servers for every click, and it is not noticeable without examining the source code for a link before clicking it."

5 of 575 comments (clear)

  1. Very useful by dada21 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This feature is extremely useful for any website that wants to give their users better content by parsing what they're going through. It also lets you figure out who is clicking advertisements (which are usually off site) and even gives you the ability to run a multitude of websites but aggregate all the statistics on one of your machines.

    Sure it can be abused -- I don't see why more of these abusive features can't be set up in a whitelist fashion. I'm already shocked that web browsers make it so difficult to white lists sites you feel are safe (or don't mind giving up some information to make your experience better).

    That comes to the point of this post -- how about a standard "setup" logo/button committee that helps create a "setup" web profile that sites can use to give the users options on how they want to be configured? We've got some standard buttons already (RSS feed, etc), why not one that users could be familiar with so that they can white list or opt-in to certain additional "anti-privacy" features?

    I know many websites (including a few of mine) could use more user information, and I don't see why we can't work to just setting a standard for how to do it.

  2. You can already do this with Javascript by dmoen · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I would recommend Firefox be distributed with this option disabled.

    Are you also recommending that Firefox be distributed with Javascript disabled? Because this ping functionality is easy enough to implement in javascript. If ping is disabled by default, then nobody will have it enabled, which means that web developers will continue to do it the old fashioned way, and the ability to disable ping will be worthless.

    Doug Moen.

    --
    I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
  3. Don't worry yet by courtarro · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "Quietly" refers to Mozilla's inclusion of this feature in the nightly trunk versions, not the official version available for download. That's hardly cause for concern. I'll bet most of the features added to nightlies are "quiet", so that's just a bit of fear mongering. It's a development version! I personally don't like the idea of pings that much, but I'm willing to bet it will have a UI to allow disabling when it's released to the masses. According to the bug request to implement it:

    We should try and do an experimental implementation of , to see if there are any unexpected real-world problems.

    That's what nightlies are for! We now see that it's a controversial tag (and they're probably already well-aware), so they're giving it a shot. Would you rather them just say "no, we don't like that potential standard, so we're not going to try implementing it"?
  4. Possible fix by spitzak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why not limit the ping to the server that made the current page? This should prevent people from embedding pings into blogs, and still allow the replacement of redirects for tracking where you go. I would think unless this is done, too many people will disable it for any real sites to use it, and it will *only* be used for nefarious purposes.

  5. it's all about Google adwords by SethJohnson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why would a web developer use the ping attribute now?

    I think the main developer who would want to use it is Google with their adwords program. They're probably trying to minimize the bandwidth those redirects consume for all the clicking that happens on their ads. This is on top of the bandwidth of every page view requesting the ads to be embedded in the first place, which can't be avoided...

    Even if Google can shave off 6% of unneccessary redirects (all Firefox users), that's a big bandwidth savings.

    Seth

    --
    $5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!