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Mozilla Launches Facebook Container Add-on To Isolate Your Web Browsing Activity From Facebook (venturebeat.com)
Paul Sawers, writing for VentureBeat: On Tuesday, Mozilla announced a new tool it said will help keep Facebook from tracking your browsing across the web. The Facebook Container add-on for Firefox promises to make it "much harder" for Facebook to track you when you're not on its site. Mozilla has been working on the technology for several years already, accelerating its development in response to what it called a "growing demand for tools that help manage privacy and security," according to a statement issued by Mozilla today.
Most people are probably aware that data they directly give to Facebook -- such as "liking" a Page or updating their relationship status -- may be sold to advertisers. But fewer people know that Facebook can also track their activities on other websites that have integrated with aspects of Facebook's tracking technology, such as the pervasive "Like" button. And it's in this scenario that Mozilla is now hoping to play the good guy.
Most people are probably aware that data they directly give to Facebook -- such as "liking" a Page or updating their relationship status -- may be sold to advertisers. But fewer people know that Facebook can also track their activities on other websites that have integrated with aspects of Facebook's tracking technology, such as the pervasive "Like" button. And it's in this scenario that Mozilla is now hoping to play the good guy.
But you still sniff my DNS traffic in the nightly releases right? Christ, whos running mozilla these days... https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
Good people go to bed earlier.
And anonymise the browser by just having it say yes I have it to every plugin, font, etc. and then just report LOCAL errors to the owner that content may not work because a plugin was requested that isn't actually installed. Also remove any and all functionality that allows outbound data to be sent without a user interaction... i.e. disable mouse location sensing, disable live fields that send data in real time such as google instant. Disable search in the address bar and any number of other things that reduce security and privacy of the user.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
That's what uMatrix does: https://github.com/gorhill/uMa... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... It would be impossible to have that on by default for normal users though. Too many sites are broken by not allowing 3rd party requests, and the average user would just switch to Chrome rather then deal with making whitelists.
Google has carefully preempted any attempts to limit third party sources in web pages. By practically mandating (lest you be ranked lower in Google Search Engine results pages) that sites offload all sorts of things to separate domains ("to minimize overhead for unnecessary cookie transmissions") and even third parties ("to leverage caching of script libraries which are constant across web sites"), Google has made sure that sites break if you prevent them from loading third party resources. Now you're supposed to implement lazy loading (again, to "speed up pages", so that they will be ranked higher), which means sites won't show images unless you enable Javascript. Until web authors realize that Google is not their friend, the web is fucked.
I think it's time for a "tracking cookie mix and match" addon. Every time you start your browser, you get a new tracking cookie from a pool of participating people that originally belonged to someone else. After a couple minutes you return the cookie to the pool and get a new one from someone else, while yours goes to some other person.
What this eventually does is invalidate and thus poison the cookie data. Unless Google finds a way to voluntarily eliminate these cookies from their data mining, their whole data pool is useless. Which is basically all we want. Either they have to throw the cookies away that they use to track us, or they have to throw all tracking cookies away.
Either is fine by me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.