PSA: Firefox has new telemetry for ads enabled by default

brent

[deleted] lynx --load-guidoesn't work for me. do you think it needs sudo?

Axios

Hmm I missed that one to and I always read the whatsnew.

brent

Axios Hmm I missed that one to and I always read the whatsnew.

I'm hearing that a lot in my reading.

Staudey

Axios It's in the Firefox 128 release notes: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/128.0/releasenotes/

Axios

Ya I remb reading about it but didnt click in my mind for some reason.
Maybe way it was worded or something.
Who knows.

brent

Axios "Firefox now supports the experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API, which provides an alternative to user tracking for ad attribution. This experiment is only enabled via origin trial and can be disabled in the new Website Advertising Preferences section in the Privacy and Security settings."

It was generically buried in the middle without fanfare. It shipped/updated with this feature enabled which, to me, had to over-ride most user's security settings. A little reckless. That's what rattled cages. Glad it was brought to my attention.

Lucien_Lachance

whats the status of librewolf these days?

brent

Lucien_Lachance my flatpack librewolf is still 127.XX so one edition behind. flatpak update shows nothing yet.

niobleoum

Lucien_Lachance Librewolf and Waterfox seem to be unaffected by this "feature". There have been a lot of red flags concerning Mozilla practices, certainly enough to make one consider distancing themselves from them. Both Waterfox and Librewolf are pretty easy to setup on any distro and are completely compatible with Firefox personal settings, addons et cetera - thus I would recommend switching to them instead.

Lucien_Lachance

niobleoum wasnt waterfox bought by someone nasty though?

brent

Lucien_Lachance
There's this same guy at a privacy guide website that is not called privacy guide says the waterfox dev threw in with mozilla and went to the dark side with his fork. I have heard this before (reddit maybe) but I don't know.

LibreWolf has been a daily browser forever. I trust it completely. It won't ship with half the Firefox security settings in it. And I hate pimping/flogging but check out https://privacytests.org/. **
All this guy does is run fingerprint/canvas tests nightly--he needs hobbies🙂. He calls himself, for the sake of transparency, a Brave or ex-Brave employee. But Libre Wolf ranks at the top of his tests for years. Strangely so does Mullvad, And no surprise Brave.

Ungoogled Chromium, my other daily browser, ranks awful, Stinkeroo.
I know you run containers so you have a layer of protection most don't.
**to be fair to all browsers, I believe he tests OOTB settings. they couldn't be compared any other way I believe.

@niobleoum : there was a time I prided myself on tweaking Firefox to be as fortified as LibreWolf but these days I feel I am losing that battle. For every GUI setting you change you have to go into about:config and tighten more because some setting will be gotten around methinks.

niobleoum

brent Aren't they back to being independent after severing ties with System1 last year?

brent

niobleoum I didn't even know system1 bought them til I looked it up just now. They bought Startpage years ago, right? Or was that someone else?

So yes from one article I can see System1 dumped them in 2023, so independent. But the things the other guy was talking about are independent of System 1 (like suspect sites the browser connects to on launch, for example, and other things mentioned here https://avoidthehack.com/review-waterfox-browser#waterfoxisindependent).

edit: I have no clue why some type defaulted to italic and I could not fix it.