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A comment on Firefox 59 to strip path information from referrer values for 3rd parties. Parent comment

Re:Firefox 59 to strip path information from referrer values... by sleavey on Friday February 02, 2018 @02:27AM (#16289012)
Why don't websites just remove ad code from pages they don't want ads to appear on, instead of telling the ad server to not display it on such pages by using the referrer information? Seems like a convoluted way to solve the problem.
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Re:Firefox 59 to strip path information from referrer values... by groovecoder on Friday February 02, 2018 @08:40AM (#16290402)
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webappsec/2014De... is a good run-down of referrer uses from the AdSense perspective.
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Re:Firefox 59 to strip path information from referrer values... by fiddlerwoaroof on Friday February 02, 2018 @03:03AM (#16289148)
No, the advertiser doesn’t want their ad to appear on a certain publisher’s web page (e.g. banks often can get in trouble if their ads are associated with certain kinds of content).
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Re:Firefox 59 to strip path information from referrer values... by sleavey on Friday February 02, 2018 @03:25AM (#16289227)
Ah ok. But why then doesn't the ad's embed code just contain the URL of the page it's on in the query string / POST data? The (website that shows the ad's) server knows what page it is providing.
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Re:Firefox 59 to strip path information from referrer values... by andrewaylett on Friday February 02, 2018 @04:48AM (#16289486)
I suspect it does? But that's spoofable by the ad aggregator in a way that the Referer header isn't. So much of ad design is (for better or occasionally for worse) defending against bad actors.
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