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Chrome, Safari and Opera Criticised For Removing Privacy Setting (sophos.com)
It's a browser feature few users will have heard of, but forthcoming versions of Chrome, Safari and Opera are in the process of removing the ability to disable a long-ignored tracking feature called hyperlink auditing pings. From a report: This is a long-established HTML feature that's set as an attribute -- the ping variable -- which turns a link into a URL that can be tracked by website owners or advertisers to monitor what users are clicking on. When a user follows a link set up to work like this, an HTTP POST ping is sent to a second URL which records this interaction without revealing to the user that this has happened. It's only one of several ways users can be tracked, of course, but it's long bothered privacy experts, which is why third-party adblockers often include it on their block list by default.
Until now, an even simpler way to block these pings has been through the browser itself, which in the case of Chrome, Safari and Opera is done by setting a flag (in Chrome you type chrome://flags and set hyperlink auditing to 'disabled'). Notice, however, that these browsers still allow hyperlink auditing by default, which means users would need to know about this setting to change that. It seems that very few do.
Until now, an even simpler way to block these pings has been through the browser itself, which in the case of Chrome, Safari and Opera is done by setting a flag (in Chrome you type chrome://flags and set hyperlink auditing to 'disabled'). Notice, however, that these browsers still allow hyperlink auditing by default, which means users would need to know about this setting to change that. It seems that very few do.
... and made Firefox lift its game out of complacency, but it is long past the time to return to FF.
Can't this be fixed with extensions? Currently Ublock doesn't let the browser to ping even though the feature is enabled. Also ping attribute is trivial to detect and remove compared to obfuscated JS code.
This is a natural result of the Chromification of the web (where standards based browsers are increasingly being replaced with a single, monopoly-owned browser, Chrome). Who would have thought that giving google more power over the web would result in this!?
Just seek out one of the alternatives, it's sad that these mainstream browsers are ok with the privacy issues that tracking incurs but hey, we are the product right? I'd gladly pay for software, browsers included that doesn't track and pay a premium for actually defending my privacy without ambiguous TOS that changes every time the wind shifts.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I wasn't even remotely aware of this 'ping' attribute.
Now that I do, I think I'll have some fun having it modified by an extension to 'ping' back a URL with a nasty message in it!
AC comments get piped to
i never knew it was there, but i do now, and i just disabled that spying feature (bug) and it looks like chromium-73.x.xxxx is the last version of chromium i will use, when the next version is released with that feature forced on users i will switch to firefox full time
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Brave is Chromium based, but is called out in article as not changing its behavior.
What about the actual Chromium browser itself (rather than Chrome). Does anyone know if Chromium went evil?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I couldn't find any response from Google, though there could very well be. But this just seems like a shortcut for something Google and others have done for a long time, which is just use an intermediate link as the tracker, which just does a redirect to the ultimate destination. A site admin could just replace any links on the site with intermediate links to the tracker/redirector.
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I'm not sure why you think those three browsers are repackaged versions of each other. Apple forked WebKit in 2010 as WebKit2 for use in Safari, and hasn't used WebKit proper since it made the switch. Google forked WebKit in 2013 as Blink for use in Chromium/Chrome, and hasn't used WebKit proper since it made the switch. In the last few years, Chromium has been adopted by Opera and Microsoft, but Safari—despite having started at the same place that Chrome started—today remains on a different foundation. That Safari is making this change at the same time as the others is due to political/corporate maneuvering, not technical changes.
Also, while there are valid arguments to be made against a browser monoculture—a problem that WebKit-based browsers are contributing to—that doesn't mean that the rendering engines themselves are bad. Far from it, I think most people would agree that on their technical merits, WebKit-based engines are among the best we have, and certainly aren't bad enough to justify your vitriolic frothing against them.
Can you trust that someone who openly has antisemitic views (see his "Jewgle" nonsense) to secure your computer?
Can you really trust a prolific spammer like APK to secure your computer?
Can you trust that a hateful person like APK doesn't include malicious functionality within his closed source software?
The answer to each of these questions should be no. APK is not to be trusted. There are superior open source alternatives to his software, such as Steven Black's software. It's written in Python, so it works on far more systems (like MacOS) than APK's inefficient closed source program. It also doesn't require a GUI, so it can be run automatically as a cron job to keep your hosts file updated.
I was sad to see that Vivaldi browser has this enabled by default.
I uninstalled opera last night and switched back to Firefox. I don't like forced updates, but I value my privacy more than I object to forced updates.
Previous Article vs Some Details vs Ublock setting.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Fuck. Your. A(i)ds.
I don't care that anyone would see, via a warrant, the fact that I shop at amazon, read slashdot, write code and sometimes even surf porn.
I'll give you my browser history if you really want to see it. Doesn't mean jack to me.
What I hate though is the creepy advertising. If I go to amazon to look for a blanket, every non-amazon site I visit is going to show me blankets. This creepy feeling that folks are following me around trying to tempt me with something I looked at because I had a need at the time, that's the stuff that I don't want.
Apple forked KHTML from KDE project to create WebKit to use in Safari. Please do some background check prior posting it.
Sure, but KHTML originally operated on Linux, for which we can thank Linus Torvalds. Or didn’t you know that?
Which is to say, I’m well aware of the information you just shared, but it has no relevance to the point at hand. I intentionally constrained my comment to recent history, from the forks onward, because that’s the only part of their history that was relevant. Why talk about Julius Caesar when you’re correcting someone’s understanding of the French Revolution?