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Stanford, Mozilla, Opera Launch Web Privacy Initiative
An anonymous reader writes "Stanford Law School has kicked off a 'Cookie Clearinghouse' web privacy initiative that brings together researchers and browsers. The project aims to provide a centralized and trusted repository for whitelist and blacklist data on web tracking, much like StopBadware does for malware. Mozilla and Opera are collaborating on the initiative, and Mozilla plans to integrate it into Firefox's new default third-party cookie blocking. The leader of an advertising trade group has, of course, denounced the participating browsers as 'oligopolies.'"
“There are billions and billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs at stake in this supply chain,” said Rothenberg, who called the browser makers “oligopolies” with excessive power to make decisions affecting the workings of the Internet. “It should be done with stakeholders’ input.”
Mr. Rothenberg, you keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means. The "stakeholders" in this are the users of the browsers, not the web site operators. Get that part right, at least. It is my browser, not the web site operators. If I don't want it to allow me to be tracked through the use of third-party cookies, I should have that choice, just like it's the web site operator's choice to deny me access if I don't allow such tracking. It's all about choice and when it comes to what my browser should or should not do, that choice is mine.
The group in question is the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which is paid to rail against pretty much anything that makes it harder for advertisers to track people online.
I don't want these shitbags tracking my browsing history, which is why I block or otherwise restrict most cookies, and block web bugs. I'm fine though with adverts - just not Randall Rothenberg's view of spying being an acceptable price for free content. Bloody hell, even his name makes him sound like some 19th century mad industrialist, busy earning a fortune from grinding childrens' bones in to cosmetics.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
See http://superuser.com/questions/257792/how-can-i-block-ads-in-internet-explorer
Not that I use IE, but I tried that immediately and it works great. No need to install any add-ons, it works right out of the box, you just have to subscribe to one of those lists (like in Adblock+). And the page with those lists is provided by Microsoft!
You know what Mr Rothenberg, we don't give a shit.
Because also at stake is our privacy, and our right to not have some douchebag advertising company know every detail of our lives.
I don't want doubleclick, quantserve, google analytics, scorecard research, and all of these other assholes to get a phone-home beacon on every page I visit -- which is why between my firewall and various things like NoScript/ScriptSafe, these sites are blocked.
I don't owe you marketing data, and I'm not interested in your product. Don't act like it's your right for me to provide you this data, because it isn't.
The advertising companies who do this are the oligopolies, Mozilla is just putting some more freedom in the hands of their consumers ... or maybe you don't like it when consumers exercise their right to be not interested in what you're selling and your just a corporate mouthpiece who is only interested in corporate freedom?
I don't have any more sympathy for advertisers than I do for telemarketers. They can both go eat shit and die.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm not convinced that's true .. because if you set Safari to block 3rd party cookies, and go to a web site, you still get 3rd party cookies.
So, whatever 'fix' Apple did seems pretty useless to me. Which is why Safari for me is used only to host Facebook -- I don't trust either of them, and if the browser never visits any other sites, there's no other information to be gleaned.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Firefox with ABP (load up the subscriptions, uncheck 'allow some advertising), NoScript (take out all the whitelisted URLs which are there by default) and Ghostery. Add in an extension which forces HTTPS.
Stop visiting sites that make you add any of their shitware scripts to the whitelists in NoScript or Ghostery.
There's a reason advertisers hate, hate, HATE those three plugins. It's because they are like holy water being poured on the foreheads of obese, slovenly vampires which want to devour your personal data.
So Rothenberg doesn't want the companies he represents to have their activities tracked and to be profiled without their consent? I seem to remember reading a rule about that. Golden something-or-other ...
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Not according to the whole way the Internet works. These are two completely unrelated domains. If you wanted the system to work for you, call your images server images.stanford.edu. Now see how simple your decision to allow or deny Stanford cookies is?
a) A general end to end encryption mechanism, as opposed to the current end to server mechanism. If I send a message to Bob using FaceBook, that is between me and bob, not Bob, Facebook, NSA, CIA, or any other law breaking faction of government that might have the technical means to grab it.
So it should be encrypted with Bob's certs, not Facebooks certs.
b) Thunderbird to support public key exchanges like SSH does. So a public key is attached to outgoing mail, a client that supports it, records that key the first time it sees it, and from then on send to my email are encrypted with that key. i.e. removing the public certificate authority, and relying on the first key exchange to encrypt mail end to end.
c) A HTML extension, declaring an encrypted edit field, with a second extension declaring the recipient. The browser only allows javascript and send to see the encrypted edit text, encrypted with the public key of the recipient (which you obtained on the first key exchange, see a). The edit field needs a visual indicator so we know its encrypted. So webmail can support end to end encryption.
d) An add on to force sites like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail into encrypted mode. So we can webmail encrypted even if the site refuses to cooperate.
e) Better control of certificates, I'd like to remove all the cert authorities that have a US base as untrusted (untrustable), but I'm reduced to going through them one by one. Also SSH has warned me in the past of attempts to substitute a certificate, does Firefox do the same?
f) File send data encrypted. People upload zip files with their banking passwords, and other details, thinking they're trusting Google or Yahoo or Dropbox or whatever with a backup copy of their data, not realizing they're handing it to a Dr Strangelove. They should have an easy way to upload it encrypted with their own key.
g) ISPs, can I have the old Deutsch Telekom trick of renewing an IP address every 2am. Making tracking more difficult.
h) ISP's if you're putting in Super NATs can we have them using a session id, and not some constant mechanism that reveals the end point after the NAT.