Firefox adds tracking protection by default

[Posted June 4, 2019 by corbet]

The Mozilla blog announces a new Firefox feature: "One of those initiatives outlined was to block cookies from known third party trackers in Firefox. Today, Firefox will be rolling out this feature, Enhanced Tracking Protection, to all new users on by default, to make it harder for over a thousand companies to track their every move. Additionally, we’re updating our privacy-focused features including an upgraded Facebook Container extension, a Firefox desktop extension for Lockwise, a way to keep their passwords safe across all platforms, and Firefox Monitor’s new dashboard to manage multiple email addresses."

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 0:15 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (22 responses)

Hilariously, some commercial sites explicitly ask you to disable Firefox's tracking protection (eg, the Washington Post), even if you don't have any advertising blocked, and refuse to deliver content unless they can track you.

It's amazing how user-hostile the commercial web has become.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 6:27 UTC (Wed) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link] (18 responses)

When I encounter a website doing that I take my eyeballs elsewhere (bye, Wired!)

It begs the question, though: how should organisations like the Washington Post make money so that they can pay their journalists? I could subscribe to The Guardian or The Financial Times like I subscribe to LWN, but so far I have not wanted to spend the money. Do those of us who want to read journalists' articles without paying by allowing ourselves to be tracked have a moral obligation to pay with money instead?

I mention the two newspapers above because their subscription options also completely remove ads.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 9:04 UTC (Wed) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (12 responses)

The was a research that showed that adds without tracking brings only 4% less in revenue for publishers. It is ads delivery networks that earns real money from tracking.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 11:06 UTC (Wed) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link] (11 responses)

> The was a research that showed that adds without tracking brings only 4% less in revenue for publishers. It is ads delivery networks that earns real money from tracking.

For many companies, 4% is more than their entire profit margin.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 6, 2019 5:21 UTC (Thu) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link]

One would hope ads without tracking are simpler to serve and thus those delivering them would be cheaper.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 6, 2019 7:10 UTC (Thu) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link] (9 responses)

That's 4% more in *advertising revenue* - not *total* revenue.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 6, 2019 8:20 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (7 responses)

Don't confuse REVENUE with PROFIT.

That's what riles me about these news stories about "Company X made £millions profit". Without knowing the *revenue* it tells you nothing. If a company makes £1m profit on revenue of £10m, it's doing reasonably well. If it makes it on revenue of £100m, it's on a knife-edge of going bust.

(That said, a lot of VC startups seem to survive forever on negative profit ...)

If a company has a profit margin of 4%, it's pretty close to going bust.

Cheers,
Wol

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 6, 2019 13:21 UTC (Thu) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (1 responses)

> If a company has a profit margin of 4%, it's pretty close to going bust.

That depends, there are plenty of industries where 4% is above avg., e.g. the German food retail or long-haul aviation.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 8, 2019 20:40 UTC (Sat) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]

Food and long-haul aviation happen to be industries where bankruptcies seem common, supporting Wol's heuristic. Even the tiny economy of Iceland has recently seen an airline going bust as soon as it became the country´s biggest and a small grocery store chain going under a tad longer after an expansion. Restaurants frequently fail to pay staff and suppliers. The Icelandic Jamie's Italian franchisee is fiscally healthy, but a thousand UK workers simultaneously lost their jobs when the restaurants owned by Jamie himself collapsed into administration. I don't expect such a disorderly exit from IBM, Oracle or any of MAGA, nor from small tech firms with robust profits. I would expect it from unicorns with <4% profit margins, and more so from those with <0% profit margins.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 6, 2019 17:10 UTC (Thu) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link] (4 responses)

I was merely making the point that *advertising* revenue is a portion of *total* revenue.

As such, a 4% increase of a *portion* doesn't tell you what proportion this increase forms of the *total*, and is therefore, a pointless statistic.

If your point is that the WSJ survives on less than 4% of its *advertising* revenue, then I'd find that quite surprising.

It's almost certain that sites like the WSJ do this out of industrial inertia (everybody is doing it, it's easy to do, etc), rather than any actual expectation of boosting profits significantly.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 6, 2019 17:21 UTC (Thu) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link] (2 responses)

Even more specifically, **online** ad revenue powered by _tracking_ users, is going to be a *portion* of *total advertising* revenue.

Probably brings it down to an almost insignificant contributor to the global scheme of things at the WSJ.

Ergo, I'd find it very hard to believe the WSJ actually need to track anyone at all.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 6, 2019 19:06 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think anyone was making a point about the WSJ - you're the only person who has mentioned it. There are plenty of other news sites that don't have a paper version and that don't do subscriptions, so pretty much 100% of their revenue must come from online advertising (where else would they be getting any money from?). Larger sites can work directly with advertisers to do ad campaigns or sponsored content etc, which are less dependent on tracking-based personalisation (and more dependent on disguising the ads as real content), but smaller sites can't afford that and I'm not aware of any good alternative to relying on automated third-party ad networks. So for many companies it can be most of their total revenue.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 8, 2019 10:43 UTC (Sat) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link]

I think the original post (k8to) did exactly that - made a point about how some commercial sites could deliver ads without tracking, but choose to track you as well.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 7, 2019 7:33 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> It's almost certain that sites like the WSJ do this out of industrial inertia (everybody is doing it, it's easy to do, etc), rather than any actual expectation of boosting profits significantly.

Which begs the question - do they even realise that they are doing it, or is it done for them by whoever they subcontract their advertising to?

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 7, 2019 7:06 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

And even this 4% is disputable because advertising budgets are not infinite and pretty much stable over time.

It's “4% loss if we gIve up on this but others continue to do it”.

In other words, don't feed this race, where past advertiser nastiness, is used to justify ever more advertising nastiness, because not being nasty would represent a “money loss” to others which are being nastier. If you say no to everyone equally the same amount of advertising money will be distributed to the same beneficiaries without the current end user harm. Probably more advertising money since part of it won't be consumed to create even more nasty ad systems.

Also, consider that the human manipulation systems developed as part of this advertising nastiness race are now repurposed to control elections and populations. The damage levels are no longer anecdotal.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 10:40 UTC (Wed) by ale2018 (guest, #128727) [Link]

Last year I subscribed to Washington Post. It costed just 1$, so I guess it's quite affordable. What I cannot afford is their email bombing afterwards. Luckily, I used a trashmail address...

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 17:34 UTC (Wed) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link] (2 responses)

The obvious answer is that subscriptions pay for journalism.

The Guardian have a great option wich allows you to support them at any level, you pick the amount you want to contribute monthly. Many papers ask for at least 10€ / monthly, which maybe isn't much by itself, but quickly adds up when you want to get your news from multiple sources.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 20:45 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I subscribe to the Guardian. I prefer their content to the Washington Post. I also prefer their stance in how they monetize their content. The Guardian invited me in, while the Post lied to me by claiming tracking protection was ad-blocking.

So sure, journalism paid by subscription makes sense to me. But some behaviors encourage me to subscribe, and some don't.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 6, 2019 12:15 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> The obvious answer is that subscriptions pay for journalism.

I don't think it's obvious that's a sustainable business model, although it may be less bad than the alternatives. The Guardian still gets 45% of its revenue from non-digital sources (physical newspaper sales and ads etc), and is barely breaking even after years of losses and cost-cutting, so it couldn't survive on just its digital revenue (subscriptions and voluntary contributions and online ads).

They don't say how much of that digital revenue is supporters vs ads, but they do report "163m unique browsers and 1.35 billion page views" in March 2019, and "over 655,000 monthly paying supporters", so something like 0.5% of readers choose to pay for it. Presumably ad revenue from the other 99.5% is still significant. Now it's a race to increase readership and increase conversion rates, fast enough to make up for the death of print and for the increasing portion of ad money being consumed by ad companies like Google and Facebook instead of going to the content producers. It's still not clear who will win that race.

(Personally I started subscribing to various sites when I considered how much time I spent reading them, vs how much money I spent per hour on books and games and TV and movies and other forms of entertainment. "10€ / monthly" doesn't sound unreasonable in that context.)

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 17:49 UTC (Wed) by wa (subscriber, #107586) [Link]

I've been a guardian subscriber for a few years now and it is excellent. They offer different levels of subscription, so you can manage the cost somewhat. Their phone app is quite good too.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 19:17 UTC (Wed) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (2 responses)

umatrix is often useful on such sites. On the rare occasion that fiddling with parameters doesn't allow a site sanitized by umatrix and ublock to load, I go elsewhere, and umatrix saves those customizations going forward.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 7, 2019 7:36 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

> umatrix is often useful on such sites. On the rare occasion that fiddling with parameters doesn't allow a site sanitized by umatrix and ublock to load, I go elsewhere, and umatrix saves those customizations going forward.

With some sites, "select all", "copy" and "paste" into a word processor shows the page contents unobscured by the "disable tracking protection" overlay. Usually even with the adverts you are expected to view in return for being allowed to read the page.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 8, 2019 23:47 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I use the reader mode button in Firefox for that. Pasting arbitrary HTML from already-hostile websites into a word processor seems like asking for trouble.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 9:48 UTC (Wed) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link] (9 responses)

You can't add stuff like that until Chrome has done it, otherwise your user experience will be terrible and people will give up and leave.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 11:30 UTC (Wed) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] (8 responses)

Chrome is going the other direction and removing the abilities to block trackers even for add-ons, from what I heard.

That said, please report sites to Mozilla that break with their Tracking Protection. They will add some limited exceptions to the rules to make specific sites still work (e.g. by allowing some cookies to be set session- only or similar things)

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 15:26 UTC (Wed) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder why their tracking protection doesn't work more like the Temporary Containers extension: "Here's an empty session for you, yours (and yours only) to track as you please!"

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 16:28 UTC (Wed) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link] (1 responses)

AFAIK that's what they target for content that breaks sites if not loaded (not sure if it's implemented atm but it was at least talked about at some point). That said, loading at all is a signal and can slow pages down so they block loading where possible.

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 19:28 UTC (Wed) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link]

Of course - even without cookies, they can track visits by IP address and whatever other bits of entropy they can get their hands on, in addition to causing useless traffic. So blocking known trackers is of course a good thing. But blacklists will never catch everything, so what I really meant was placing whatever escapes the filters in an empty session.

That's what I do right now with a combination of Firefox' built-in tracker blocking, uBlock Origin and Temporary Containers (and Containerise for the few sites I actually want to keep in a persistent session). That system works, but obviously it requires manual setup, so I appreciate them moving to protecting privacy better by default. Also, it does have a few rough edges here and there, mostly related to using containers in a somewhat unintended way (e.g. opening a new container, even automatically, forces the creation of a new tab).

Firefox adds tracking protection by default

Posted Jun 5, 2019 20:02 UTC (Wed) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link] (4 responses)

I hope it works out. Its certainly less risky than privacy badger - that stuff breaks pages quite often. But I think mostly because it starts blocking requests, not just cookies.

on Privacy Badger

Posted Jun 5, 2019 20:13 UTC (Wed) by Herve5 (subscriber, #115399) [Link] (3 responses)

This remark surprises me. I have been using Privacy Badger for years (even donating to EFF), and this together with Ublock Origin.
We really must not read the same sites outside LWN ;-)

on Privacy Badger

Posted Jun 9, 2019 2:53 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

I used to do the same, but I'd rather use uMatrix's self-destructing cookie feature and whitelist the sites I actually use. Privacy Badger is explicitly designed to handwave through any 3rd party surveillance company that drops a shibboleth at the right URL.

I also don't trust the EFF as a whole any more, after learning more about them than I wanted to know. Was considering shredding my old donation letter today.

on Privacy Badger

Posted Jun 24, 2019 15:30 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Hm, that was an interesting article, but it goes way over the top. e.g. describing Google et al, it says

On a fundamental level, these companies were like tapeworms—digital parasites that sunk their hooks into our networks of culture distribution and siphoned value as quickly as possible for themselves, without giving anything back to the people who produce culture.

This outright states that web search is valueless. Really? Try to do your job without it. Go on, I'll wait. (Oh obviously you have to give up your phone as well and try to work without that, too, since in addition to Google, the article *starts* by ranting against Apple.)

The ad-driven Web is grotesque, but claiming that companies like Google provide no value at all and are pure parasites is utter hyperbole which requires no actual thought whatsoever to disprove.

on Privacy Badger

Posted Jun 24, 2019 15:35 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Good grief: by the end it's using opposition to copyright-maximalist bills like SOPA and PIPA as proof that the opponent is a Silicon Valley shill. What on earth? Apparently all free software developers are shills (and probably everyone who produces or remixes copyrightable work who isn't a huge corporation's legal arm is a shill, too).