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Comment by eknkc | Hacker News Reader

Surprised they weren't doing that already. Facebook has javascript injected on a lot of sites, always assumed that they'd collect a shit ton of data whether you are a user or not.

Also, all ad blockers block google analytics like tracking services but social plugins are generally opt in. I guess they should be blocked by default too.

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I assume they've been tracking through Like buttons (clicked or not) for a few years, and now they've collected enough data to know how best to monetize it.

Indeed, even though they've claimed for years that the Like button tracking was "just a bug" (twice). In the Belgium lawsuit they're claiming it's for security. Facebook is hilarious (-ly evil).

We're going to need strong tracking protection in browsers by default, and very soon. If Mozilla won't do it (you can enable it in History settings, though), probably Brave, or some upstart browsers will. Same goes for uBlock and other extensions.

You are assuming they broke the european legislation for "a few years"? It's more likely they had lower hanging fruits to work on before starting this kind of tracking.

> You are assuming they broke the european legislation for "a few years"?

Not parent. I am not particularly famiiar with that legislation, but if it says that allowing websites to use your API and embed links to your site and profiting from the data in some way is illegal.

I am saying that.

I know a lot of AdBlocking Tools/List that do not block Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics by default.

Do you know the ones that do?

Ghostery, uBlock Origin. Running both in combination seems to get most bugs.

uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger is a really powerful combo and works fine

Isn't that overkill? EFF Privacy Badger states that it's a one-extension solution rather than having ghostery, adblock + others: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger (2nd FAQ)

I've never tried Privacy Badger myself, what's your reasoning for having both? Is it not quite as all-encompassing as it claims?

It's an anti-tracking extension, not an adblocker. uBlock Origin lets you sign up to custom lists and make custom rules which can include cosmetic filters. These are helpful for removing things from view even if they get loaded by your browser, which is darn convenient even though it's useless for preventing tracking.

With fingerprinting, what's the point of all this?

Browsers and Internet commections now have enough discoverable stuff via HTTP and JS to identify users uniquely enough that in 99% of cases the user's session can really get a unique id! Across publishers! Without third party cookies!!

Making it less reliable means the targeted ads are worth less money. Making it more difficult means it's less likely to be profitable.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/random-agent-...

That's great, but once you factor in all the people who downloaded this plugin and are otherwise slightly harder to fingerprint, it's still 99% accurate!

So now what?

I don't understand your logic here

There's more to profiling than profiles. Local network topology, for example.

Ahhh, got it. Any suggestions then?

I was saying the number of people who install a plugin that varies the user agent is tiny, and even then there are other ways to detect (just check out the lists of things, screen sizes etc.)

And the big picture is, regardless of these small imperfections, a digital fingerprint is over 95% accurate! So that's very valuable!

You are stealing from the websites and content creators who needs to track and exploit your personal information to provide the internet as we know it today. /s

Just to add to the others comments, get NoScript and you can control exactly who gets to run Javascript at all times. It makes the internet so much safer and you will be blown away at how many domains some sites are trying to run scripts from.

By the way, isn't there a way to do this on Firefox itself? It would be an interesting option along with "don't accept cookies; exceptions".

Gotta 2nd NoScript for blocking all detritus from wasting my data caps & cpu cycles, although the default white-list needs much purging out of the box.

For added goodness, I also run the Blender Add-On[1] for the sites I do allow on occasion. I value my privacy <b>MORE</b> than the marketeers do.

[1]https://github.com/meh/blender

Noscript is harmful, the dev sold out and showed Spyware ads on its own noscript website! Noscript didn't block it btw. Change user agent to Windows and visit the site, see uf it's still up. You can't trust noscript.

uMatrix (from gorhill=Raymond Hill, of uBlock Origin fame) is extremely useful. I haven't used NoScript in 5 years or so, so things might have changed - but compared to what I remember, uMatrix is no less capable (in fact, more capable), and much easier to use -- though sadly, still not at a level that a non-techie will use.

uMatrix blocks all analytics by default.

I'm running uBlock + uMatrix. Very clean browsing experience. Also quite bare-bones before adding site specific rules, which probably won't suit everyone :)

AdBlock doesn't block GA. AdBlock blocks ads, not on site analytics tools. To block GA, either set your browser to do not track or disable JS

uBlock Origin (rule in Peter Lowe’s Ad server list) does, as does Steven Black's hosts file[1] (probably due to pulling from Peter Lowe's list).

I use the latter for network-level blocking (dnsmasq on a DD-WRT router; forced DNS redirection), and it works surprisingly well - even the ads on my Xbox One dashboard are blocked.

[1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

See https://secure.fanboy.co.nz Enhanced Trackers and Anti-Facebook lists

uMatrix blocks all those things by default. At least 50% of sites I go to have facebook and twitter embeds. If a site doesn't load properly with cross site links blocked, most of the time I won't bother with it.

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