Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Firefox to Block Trackers

Nick Nguyen:

In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.

Via David Heinemeier Hansson:

Love the strong stance that Firefox is lining up to take on tracking. It’s a grotesque free-for-all by default at the moment. We need both political solutions like GDPR and technical safeguards like those from Firefox and Safari.

John Gruber:

Back in the early 2000s, every web browser other than IE turned toward web standards. It painted IE as the bad player, and drove IE users to switch to Firefox and other standard-based browsers. I think the same thing is happening now with ad tracking, with Safari and Firefox leading the way.

Nick Heer:

Of course, Google still makes the world’s most popular browser. There’s simply no way they can join the club of companies that actually care about user privacy with their current business model.

Previously: Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0, Firefox 11.0 for iOS Has Tracking Protection on by Default.

5 Comments RSS · Twitter

HI: question from a user unclear on the concepts: will such 'tracking blocking' do anything to prevent the ISP's from collecting data on our web traffic? I've read that they really should be a co-focus of this whole discussion, along with the apps themselves (FB, TW, Google, etc.)

Thanks.

> will such 'tracking blocking' do anything to prevent the ISP's from collecting data on our web traffic?

No. You'll need to use https to get some degree of privacy from your ISP, or use a VPN.

>> will such 'tracking blocking' do anything to prevent the ISP's from collecting data on our web traffic?
> No. You'll need to use https to get some degree of privacy from your ISP, or use a VPN.

And no matter what you do, the ISP is always, literally, the man in the middle. You have no choice but to trust them... I'd be curious to know if there are any legal constraints on them in some countries with regards to the handling of this. It would be comforting to know that they'd have to break the law to snoop in on your https traffic.

>It would be comforting to know that they'd have to
>break the law to snoop in on your https traffic.

Just make sure the certificate is correct.

So I no longer need Privacy Badger? That's cool. I don't mind more features built into Firefox.

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