Do Not Track Does Not Conquer

Posted Oct 18, 2012 21:18 UTC (Thu) by blitzkrieg3 (guest, #57873)
Parent article: Do Not Track Does Not Conquer

When do not track first came out I remember it was google's response to a Mozilla developer that came up with a sort of ad-blocker for cookies. Does anyone remember this? Or am I making this up?

to post comments

Do Not Track Does Not Conquer

Posted Oct 19, 2012 1:12 UTC (Fri) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link] (4 responses)

Are you thinking of Google's "analytics opt-out" addon? And yeah, I suspect there are ways to get some genuine client-side protection against third-party tracking (by shutting down ipc between origins, be it through cookies or whatever — a page accessing another origin's cookies through an iframe would either block or get cookies namespaced by the outer origin).

Do Not Track Does Not Conquer

Posted Oct 19, 2012 5:35 UTC (Fri) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link] (3 responses)

The Ghostery add-on for Firefox and Chrome is an effective client-side "tracker blocker."

Do Not Track Does Not Conquer

Posted Oct 21, 2012 5:50 UTC (Sun) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link] (2 responses)

Ghostery?

No thanks.

Do Not Track Does Not Conquer

Posted Oct 22, 2012 9:05 UTC (Mon) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link]

Good spot, I didn't know that. (yay for having such information buried in smallprint)

Do Not Track Does Not Conquer

Posted May 30, 2015 21:40 UTC (Sat) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link]

Woo, good thing I didn't actually click on that link, but just hovered over it to see where it went.
If I *HAD* gone, I might actually have been bound by their EULA! But as it is, I've never seen it, and it's not presented upon installation; so I can treat it as if it doesn't exist and isn't enforceable.

Right now there's a number of choices.
I use a combination of extensions.
Ghostery is pretty popular.
http://disconnect.me/ is another popular one.
Even the EFF's weighed in: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

But what I've had the best luck with so far is uMatrix:
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki

And it's 'younger brother', uBlock Origin.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

However, uMatrix is a heck of a sledgehammer, and it's easy to put holes in the drywall of a lot of sites.
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/wiki/Using-uBlock-with...

Both uBlock Origin and uMatrix are open source GPLv3.

Yes, that's right, I'm using five extensions to try and keep my privacy high and bandwidth low.
Privacy Badger eats cookies, disconnect.me destroys annoying social networking buttons, uBlock Origin isolates all the domains serving malware, and uMatrix keeps me from tripping over advertiser-redirects when clicking links.

On second thought, I rarely see ghostery doing anything anymore, and it's actively conflicting with disconnect.me and causing ignorable extension errors like this:

"This extension failed to redirect a network request to about:blank because another extension (Ghostery) redirected it to data:application/javascript;base64,ZnVuY3Rpb24gcXVhbnRzZXJ2ZSgpe30="

Maybe it's time I gave ghostery the boot; I've cycled out all of my other extensions over time as new ones were introduced, or performance was improved (uBlock Origin has definitely reduced memory usage over AdblockChrome) in some way.

Time to open Ghostery up in notepad++ and apply ye olde reverse engineering talent against it... I can probably figure out how to dump the settings I've cultivated into a text file suitable for loading in uBlock Origin...