Comment by alangpierce | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alangpierce | Hacker News Reader

I could imagine a few reasons for this:

• CBS is being malicious, and it's intentionally refusing to play the video if they detect tracking protection. (It sounds like a lot of people on the thread are assuming it's this one, and it very well may be.)

• CBS is being lazy, and didn't bother to test with tracking protection and work through any technical issues (like implementing graceful fallbacks).

• CBS is being cautious, and knows they haven't tested tracking protection as much, so they're leaving "disable tracking protection" in as a troubleshooting step, since it certainly does reduce the number of variables.

• Firefox is being unreasonable, and makes it enough of a pain to implement a website that works with tracking protection that CBS doesn't want to play ball. As a simple example, if Firefox's tracking protection blocked all cookies, plenty of honest parts of the internet would break (so it works differently, apparently with a domain block list). It sounds like others have had trouble with blocked domains that are sometimes used for tracking and sometimes for legitimate non-tracking purposes (like force.com, apparently), but I don't have a good sense of how common that really is.

Anyone have enough experience with these things to know how likely/reasonable the different explanations are? (Or if there are other reasons that I missed.)

Firefox tracking protection doesn't block all cookies - just third party trackers on the disconnect.me basic list [1].

While all scenarios you listed are theoretically possible, basic due diligence suggests that there are pretty significant differences in their likelihoods of occurence. It is disingenuous to treat these as equally likely just to appear fair.

1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection

> It is disingenuous to treat these as equally likely just to appear fair.

Then it's a good thing that the comment explicitly wasn't doing that, openly unsure of the likelihoods.

Understanding how Firefox tracking protection works is one google button press away.

If you tell me that the OP had the time, patience, and technical skill to list all those possibilities but could not do a basic check on how Firefox tracking protection works, and instead talks about how with Firefox tracking protection "plenty of honest parts of the internet would break", and how blocked domains are used "sometimes for legitimate non-tracking purposes", forgive me for not buying the "openly unsure" claim.

I've used Firefox tracking protection since it was release, and I definitely have had occasional issues with "honest" sites not loading. Not super often, but it's happened.

As mentioned in my comment, I'm aware that tracking protection uses a domain block list. (I edited it about a minute after posting to make that more clear.) I did do some research, I just didn't link to it because the comment was getting too long.

I don't think a basic technical understanding is good enough to know how it plays out in practice. Computers are complicated, humans are complicated, organizations are complicated, and I've seen many cases where people jump to unfair conclusions because they oversimplified a situation. I think that hearing from people with experience (e.g. people who have worked at a company like CBS or people who worked on Firefox's tracking protection feature or something similar) is much more likely to lead to an accurate understanding of the situation than trying to work off of assumptions.

From the perspective of the website ff tracking protection is the same as an adblock user. I think they are just distinguishing both cases because most ff users don't know that they are using an ad blocker.

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