> Chrome will happily collect as much private information about me and my browsing history and share them with select parties, as needed
What information does Chrome provide in this scenario that Firefox doesn’t? It feels like backward logic: it worked in Chrome therefore it must be because Chrome gave extra info. In reality it could be a whole bunch of things, something as mundane as Firefox being a rarer user agent so subject to more filtering. I have no clue but I wasn’t persuaded that it’s because Chrome was giving away more information.
> But of course I wasn’t because Chrome doesn’t have the same privacy- and security-enhancing designs
Maybe I’m missing something but it seems the conflation was by the article author, not me?
To be clear, I don’t even use Chrome, in part because “Google bad”. This just isn’t intellectually honest.
> Eventually, I found some suggestions that if you’re using Firefox you can disable the privacy.resistFingerprinting option in the about:config page. But that was already listed as false for me when I got stuck, so I switched the value to true just to see if that would do anything.
> And that worked!Firefox on Android was still working, though, loathe as I am to put passwords of any significance on my phone. Doesn't directly address your question, which I'd like to know the answer to as well.
Back in the day, my university would load balance based on the browser being used. When results were released every semester, all you needed to do to switch to the fast lane instead of contending with other students for resources was jump on IE (or even spoof your user agent). None of this was public knowledge.
I say this just to make the point that people do all sorts of weird stuff with web infrastructure. The inferences made in this privacy nut’s blog post seem a bit off the cuff.
Absolutely not, it is not reasonable or expected that a credit card company launch a website that doesn't work with Firefox.
> Back in the day, my university would load balance based on the browser being used.
What on earth?
To your specific point about just moving elsewhere, complaining in public about bad industry practices is part of Capitalism and part of how consumers regulate the free market. "Take your business elsewhere instead of complaining" has never really been how this has worked; businesses don't get to opt out of being shamed just because they have a cancellation form, and they shouldn't have any expectation that users will or should be quiet about their bad business practices. The free market is not a replacement for criticism within social spaces; the free market works alongside that criticism and is reinforced by that criticism.
Public complaining is an essential part of how consumers within a free market coordinate with each other and educate each other about abusive corporate behavior, and it serves as an additional mechanism alongside boycotts and cancellations to help punish bad actors in the market.
Oh well, what can you do? Vote with your wallet. Tell everyone on HN and Reddit. I agree. But at a certain point it wastes too much of my energy, so I'll basically just cancel cand tell them I can not use their service because reasons, very disappointed, bye.
Sigh
In terms of being blocked by CloudFront (not cloudflare),I actually got a website to fix their policies by just emailing their tech support and showing that simple user-agent changes bypasses their policy anyhow.
My high-level understanding is that they're going to run an ML model over your browsing history (locally on your device) to build a list of "topics" that you care about. Sites you browse can use the Topics API to pull a set of these interests from the browser to show you "relevant" ads. Mozilla has taken a negative position against this standard.
>> Chrome will happily collect as much private information about me and my browsing history and share them with select parties, as needed
> What information does Chrome provide in this scenario that Firefox doesn’t?
Is Cloudflare using an as yet unshipped API as part of DDOS protection?
But this new API demonstrates that Google is not on the consumers side when it comes to limiting tracking/data gathering ability, as the new API is explicitly for fingerprinting.
Whether Mozilla/Apple/others agree is a different story. The blowback has mostly been around how topics aren't perfect and the design still leaves room for abuse and therefor effectively devolves to traditional tracking: https://mozilla.github.io/ppa-docs/topics.pdf.
The argument from supporters is that this is a step away from the “fingerprint and track” status quo MO. The argument from detractors is that it doesn't quite achieve that goal.
All you need to address your concern is for access to the API to be user-configurable.
And it should be behind a permissions prompt
But that’s exactly what I’m saying: the author asserts as fact the reason Chrome worked was because it gives up more personal information but there’s no interrogation of whether that’s actually true and if true, how it’s achieved.
I’m no defender of Google I just believe we should be making arguments we’re able to actually back up.
If the site is serving Google, Meta, or ads from other networks, your unique browser fingerprint is one of the tools that makes it possible to target and retarget you.
I think the fingerprinting is a red herring. Yes, Chrome is less secure. But Chrome worked.
It's quite possible someone at the author's workplace updated their Cloudflare WAF settings and made things more strict, causing more checks. I'd even offer that a Firefox extension might be contributing.
But the argument that Chrome worked because it offered Cloudflare personal information is pretty out there ;)
(I know it's a fork, but the actual engine is still mostly Chromium.)
But yes, 3 is all we're left with outside of a few bespoke projects...
Servo doesn't have a browser but I'd wager that writing a full featured browser for Servo would be much more useful than another Blink browser
“The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) provides user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web. This data is automatically collected by Chrome from users who have opted in, . . .”
Taken from https://web.dev/crux-and-rum-differences/
I harden my Firefox installations, and therefore this website comparison isn't useful.
The site that morjom posted gives you a simple overview and Firefox is known for the privacy preserving features it comes with. However, you are right, that it is an inexact science as long as we don't know the logic of the Cloudflare implementation.
I have ublock, privacy badger, decentraleyes, canvas blocker, facebook disconnect, and duckduckgo privacy essentials installed.
I would go through and disable each extension in order to see if it was the cause of the issue, and so far, every single time it has been duckduckgo privacy essentials that is breaking websites for me.
I think I should remove it at this point, but who knows? Maybe it's protecting me from something that I don't see.
Really? That's news to me.
Case in point: Many of those targeted ads contain malware. :)
Any modern browser that doesn't actively fingerprint as either most-common Chrome on a laptop, most-common Android browser, or most-common iPhone is written by such hopelessly naïve nerds that they shouldn't be trusted with user-facing software with real security considerations.
Since Chrome is so common that it's basically guaranteed to have been tested against the site I'm trying to access, I use Chrome.
Or Cloudflare.
The older you get, the more valuable being able to just dump your shit on other people becomes.
I wonder how world views were shaped with those entering the industry post GFC and with google and aws on the ascendency.
The absolute state of software engineers and systems administrators in here, man. Talk about overengineering and premature optimisation, let alone being totally oblivious that their laziness is what creates a monopoly.
Also, fingerprinting isn't always "bad" -- any business who takes credit cards online, wants to try to exclude people who will commit fraud (because they might have done it before.) Preventing fingerprinting, means you prevent certain anti-fraud, which means that you see higher prices and more friction doing commerce online, which also affects your experience. The connection is just much less direct.
(My point? Characterising anonymity with an item of clothing associated with paramilitaries has associations that don't need to be there.)
I still today wear a mask in every store I enter and I can completely honestly say that I have never gotten a weird look from staff over it; it's never been a problem.
Admittedly France has tried this bullcrap with burkas before, but that's not exactly something anyone should be emulating, I think we'd pretty much all agree that "I'm sorry but for security reasons you can't buy groceries wearing a burka" is not an acceptable argument. Security doesn't grant free license to override other people's rights.
Bear in mind that the actual real-world examples of the argument "people shouldn't be able to wear masks in stores because of security risks" have for the most part mostly been examples of security being used as a justification to infringe on religious rights or to block marginalized/disabled people from taking reasonable safety measures to protect themselves from infectious disease.
If you're going to bring up an example of security overriding other concerns, at least bring up an example where security hasn't observably immediately become a slippery slope to infringing on people's rights and excluding them from society. Is "stores can ban you for wearing a mask" supposed to make me more comfortable with websites fingerprinting me? I mean, I know where that argument ends up in the real world, it never ends with balaclavas, we've had that argument in the real world and where it actually ends is with immunocompromised people not being able to buy groceries.
So I'm not sure any of this is really supporting your point. Anonymity should not be punished in physical or virtual spaces, and there are huge debates about de-anonymization, facial recognition, and tracking in both public and private physical spaces and for the most part we don't accept security as a justification for de-anonymization.
But why.
----
More seriously (and more relevantly), in the context of the current conversation about privacy and user autonomy, the correct answer to "why do you need to be able to do X" should usually be, "that's none of your business."
"Why do you need to run a VPN?" None of your business. "Why do you need to wear a mask?" None of your business. "Why do you have WebGL disabled?" None of your business. "Why does your browser not have this font installed?" None of your business.
A big part of autonomy and agency is that you don't need to ask permission or justify to anybody why you're doing the things you have agency to do. If you need to explain then it's not autonomy, it's permission. I don't feel I need anyone's permission to wear a mask indoors in a public space regardless of my reasoning (and in practice I'm never asked to explain, millage may vary but my experience is that nobody really cares). And similarly I shouldn't need Cloudflare's permission to run an obscure browser or to customize my computer setup.
The price is the highest the market will pay. Increasing that price means few customers lower revenue. Fraud is a cost to the business they must pay out of profits because if they tried to increase prices demand would drop.
Granted, I'm not aware of a lack of fingerprint being penalized. That said, there are products that allow custom rules, in which case anything is possible.
I work for a company in this space. Opinions are my own.
In this context the goal of fingerprinting is to detect requests coming from an attacker. It does not care about the ability to distinguish between individual machines.
>Once a card is deemed stolen it stops working so it's unnecessary for that scenario.
The whole point of automating it is so you can cash out many stolen credit cards. If you only have one you might as well do it manually.
>Increasing that price means few customers lower revenue
Making more revenue doesn't matter if that extra revenue ends up getting eaten by chargebacks.
By the same argument you could say it should be fine for a physical store to refuse service to anyone who they get a bad feeling about or don't want to serve. But if you permit that then you're immediately opening the door to racism etc., which we consider socially unacceptable. It should be the same for websites too - I bet all these browser fingerprinting techniques just happen to mean better service for people who can afford the latest iphone.
How bad is it nowadays? Can't you just enforce 3DS2?
And if we're taking things to task for monopolizing a market and being a threat to the future of the open internet, I'd say Cloudfare is and will always be a bigger threat.
The moment the Cloudfare dictatorship becomes less benevolent, everyone is gonna feel it.
In my eyes they have already done that. ICYMI I highly suggest checking out their response and subsequent blog post around the Kiwifarms incident.
That whole debacle was enough to prove to me they learned nothing and are going to continue down this path. I migrated web services and closed my account with them shortly after that whole thing.
Cloudflare routinely ignores abuse reports for its network and takes no responsibility for the utter garbage being carried across their network. It’s almost comical how they so desperately cling to the claim that they are “just a dumb pipe” on one side of the house and on the other a “serious security vendor” who is “protecting the web” while blocking out users simply for the “crime” of trying to preserve their privacy.
If they wanted to convince me they had the web’s best interest at heart they wouldn’t host half the sites they do. They would actually respond to abuse reports and take abusive websites offline rather than wait for it to hurt their bottom line and reputation before taking action but they don’t.
https://www.axios.com/cdn-cgi/challenge-platform/h/g/orchest...
It's amusing to see developers incessantly complain about writing source code that other people can read and understand and then we look at the web and see stuff like this which people are expected to run without question.
I'm not suggesting this type of JS payload is unique or that it's doing anything untoward. Nor am I suggesting with some effort one cannot determine what it's doing. I'm suggesting it does not follow this supposed ideal of writing code that others can easily read and understand. No one is expected to read it.
The heuristics used to attempt to differentiate between a so-called "bot" and a "human" are, IMHO, inadequate as long as there are "humans" that are mistaken for "bots" and blocked. "Use Chrome" is not a solution. A person using Firefox or some other non-Google software is still a "human". But not according to these brilliant "site protection" schemes. What level of false positives is acceptable.
(I've tried it, that's how I know)
I care about a lot of real world stuff - human rights, wars, the environment, friends etc. I don't care if Chrome knows who I am and tries to show me ads which uBlock then blocks. There are more important things to worry about than privacy geekery.
If you've read history (and maybe you have, or not) privacy is a human right. When privacy goes away, then everything else goes away. Ask anyone over 60 in Germany or Romania (that was not WITH the army or the Police/Security services) and they will tell you how nice life is without privacy.
But hey, sure, 1) privacy doesn't matter, 2) you got nothing to hide, etc etc.
> What about Google Chrome?
> I tried all of the above in Firefox. So I naturally tried to access the same page in Google Chrome to see if I’d still be blocked. Thankfully, I wasn’t.
> But of course I wasn’t because Chrome doesn’t have the same privacy- and security-enhancing designs that Firefox does. Chrome will happily collect as much private information about me and my browsing history and share them with select parties, as needed. It also doesn’t resist fingerprinting or let me modify settings to the same degree that Firefox does because Chrome relies on those fingerprinting technologies to ensure that I am targeted by ads it deems necessary for me to see.
> Being blocked on Firefox and not blocked on Chrome also tells me that Cloudflare is blocking me based on the fingerprint (or lackthereof) of my browser. Everything about my connection is identical between the two requests, aside from the browser being used. It’s the same security certificates, same corporate VPN, same machine, even the same timeframe when I try to access the site.
If you care about anything these days, don't use Chrome.