Comment by account-5

3 years ago

Key actionable info: use Firefox.

Completely immune from this and you don't need to worry that toggle will get mysteriously turn back on.

> you don't need to worry that toggle will get mysteriously turn back on.

I will be caustious with such statement.

https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/ipa/

IPA now allows these companies to track users across multiple IP addresses, and regardless of the user's cookie settings, via a unique tracking identifier. It is also proposed that the operating system provides the unique tracking identifier which can then be used by all applications or browsers on a device, allowing different devices behind a single IP address to be distinguished.

Mozilla is one of the authors.

  • > IPA now allows

    Any more info on IPA? That link doesn't even say what the acronym stands for. I couldn't figure out how it's supposed to work, too complicated. Wikipedia doesn't seem to have heard of it, and a cursory websearch didn't offer an explanation.

    > Mozilla is one of the authors.

    Mozilla as a company, or is it that there are Mozilla developers contributing? If Mozilla are planning to introduce a built-in tracking system to Firefox, doesn't that imply shooting off your one remaining foot?

Mozilla has disabled privacy controls in the past without informing users. For example, they removed the “prompt when setting a cookie” (so that you could reject/accept/accept for this session only) without a replacement. Newer versions just accepted all cookies as persistent, non-session cookies automatically. There are other examples like this.

It's difficult to deal with because as the code evolves, so do the configuration settings. The rate of change is high, and it's not always obvious what is relevant to users (and whether a new feature increases or decreases privacy!), so it's hard to communicate this in release notes.

> ... you don't need to worry that toggle will get mysteriously turn back on.

Using Firefox Developer edition and toggle(s) will get mysteriously turned back on all the time. And Mozilla is not immune to this practice at all for standard Firefox.

Use chromium-ungoogled [1] if you want chrome(ium) without Google-specific stuff.

[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Agreed, using Firefox more and more and assisting everyone you know on how to switch and make it default with it is key.

Show someone how to do it, and they can be asked to show someone else