Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

http://tech.eu/features/1872/adblock-plus-facebook-tracking/

by robinwauters • 12 years ago

203 112 12 years ago

Great work. This facebook policy was absolutely disgusting.

and to all site owners moaning about people using adblock : this is why we can't have nice things. as long as policies like this exist, I'll block anything remotely able to track me.

fchollet2• 12 years ago

It is very difficult to get somebody to understand something when they have some amount of income depending on not understanding it. Of course site owners are always going to stand behind the ad-supported model of the web, even though it creates all the wrong incentives for content creators and massively degrades the user experience. And generally, degrades the very value proposition of the web.

(disclaimer: I run a 5k DAU social network with no ads).

tech-no-logical4• 12 years ago

true. but as long as site owners use ad-providers that track me, I don't really care. I will gladly reconsider my blocking ads if and when ad-providers are used that don't do this.

maybe site-owners should pressure ad-providers to provide a track-free service ?

GrinningFool• 12 years ago

I will happily accept advertisements as long as they are self-hosted in a way that doesn't report back to any external entity.

The problem [for me] is not the advertising as long as it's reasonably done (static, textual, non-invasive). It's the fact that every third party has their own behaviours, and I have no idea what any of them are. I instead must rely on the judgement of the person running the site - and most of them appear fairly unaware of the privacy implications associated with both advertisements and analytics services.

nfoz• 12 years ago

At least part of the problem is that we, as a society, have no idea how to fund the development of creative / digital works. We can't find good business models for this in general.

I agree that ad-supported is terrible. But how else? I'm hopeful for donation-crowdfunding and simple, liquid micropayment options online. But I don't know that that could significantly displace ads.

Wicher• 12 years ago

If it's the tracking you'd like to avoid, don't use ad blockers!

They're the wrong tool for the job. They're for blocking ads. So they'll block ads that are not leaking your info (for your use case, a false positive) and will not (not necessarily) block other means by which you're being tracked (for your use case, a false negative).

Use something like RequestPolicy (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...) or PrivacyBadger (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) instead. That way, you're not blocking ads per sé — though a side effect of using RequestPolicy is that you won't see much ads — you're blocking the leakage of information to third parties instead.

Using blanket ad blocking sends the wrong signal to site owners, and creates little incentive to do the 'right thing' — it lets the "bad apples" (which I imagine to be something like 99% of the online ad businesses) spoil it for the one percent that does value your privacy, with no way for anyone to improve. Using ad blocking for privacy reasons is not completely effective (false negatives) and worse, it's punishing individuals for the behaviour of the flock.

=========================================================

Edit: Found the perfect example of the false-positive and false-negative I'm talking about above: http://www.gentoo.org . Harmless ads — just images inside html <a> anchors, loaded from the domain in the site URL. Not leaking anything. The ads help an organization I support.

So what does AdblockPlus do (default settings)? It blocks them. What does RequestPolicy do? It lets them through.

tech-no-logical4• 12 years ago

I tried requestpolicy, I found it too cumbersome to use. with adblock edge, I subscribe to 2 lists and I'm done. I'd try again if they adopt such a feature.

mp3geek4• 12 years ago

So don't use Adblock Plus because it works too well? And if theres false positives with either the Adblock or Tracking lists it comes with whitelists get around certain website bugs.

dspillett4• 12 years ago

To minimise the tracking without plugins: always login to facebook and anything that has your personal details in a "private" session or a browser you don't normally use with flash turned off (or not installed in the first place). Not perfect, but good enough for me.

Of course everyone in my other browser sessions is tracking me between sites, but it isn't linked to my social profiles and such.

TBH I don't really care about the tracking of me. The thing that I find annoys is the combined tracking of me and my contacts: I don't like the idea of them trying to track other people through me.

fchollet2• 12 years ago

This is a very shallow way of "escaping"; your browsing activity is definitely being linked to your social media identities via your IP(s) and browser fingerprint.

For instance Google does maintain such non-cookie-based user identities. I'd be highly surprised if Facebook didn't as well; your data is just too valuable to pass on such easy fixes.

dspillett4• 12 years ago

Aye, my IP addresses at most locations are fixed.

The browser fingerprint isn't going to help them though.

Of course the only real solution (other than cutting yourself off completely) is for there to be a stable, secure, reliable, non-tracked, ad-free alternative that enough people use - and that isn't going to happen unless you have a spare high improbability generator handy.

gleenn• 12 years ago

I sandbox Facebook inside Firefox, its the only thing I do with that browser. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy for continuing to use the browser too, I like Mozilla.

teamhappy4• 12 years ago

I take it Ghostery takes care of it as well. Does anybody know?

zo12• 12 years ago

I'd also be curious to know this. Ghostery was quite an eye-opener when I first tried it. Everytime you go to a site, it lists all the items that it blocked on that page.

mp3geek4• 12 years ago

I can't speak for Ghostery, but when false positives on webpages occur its easier to debug and fix issues in Adblock Plus.

teamhappy4• 12 years ago

Debugging as a user or developer? It literally takes a single click to disable a specific tracker for a specific site or to disable tracking globally to see if Ghostery broke something.

mp3geek4• 12 years ago

Its a bit old, but Adblock Plus lists rank pretty well for privacy; http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6730 also another comparson; https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/wiki/How-does-HTT...

teamhappy4• 12 years ago

The block lists are great. I'm using them in a different plugin though.

bmcd87• 12 years ago

Yes, Ghostery has multiple different Facebook trackers in it's database.

This doesn't seem like anything new, just a reaction to the news that Facebook is going to expand what they do with the data they collect.

(I'm a Ghostery developer)

Bassetts2• 12 years ago

I recently switched from Adblock Plus to HTTP Switchboard[0]. I find it gives you much better control over what gets blocked, and it properly blocks what you have told it to, not just hide them.

I have it set up in quite a restrictive way so by default a site level scope is created and only image/css is allowed. It means I have to take anywhere from a couple of seconds to a few minutes to enable things a site needs to function, but I much prefer that to having tracking cookies, social media buttons, obnoxious adverts etc.

Also the Adblock site claims you can also block a few annoyances specific to Facebook[0]. Is that actually the case? I thought Adblock just used element hiding.

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard/ [1] https://facebook.adblockplus.me/en/

mkesper• 12 years ago

Not (yet) available for Firefox, sorrily.

Bassetts2• 12 years ago

That is true, and something I forgot to mention in my original comment. I do believe the author intends to eventually have it work on Firefox, but I doubt that will be any time soon due to the fact it currently relies heavily on the Chrome API.

Ardren2• 12 years ago

Initial ad blocking extensions for Chrome used element hiding due to addon limitations in Chrome. But for at least the last few years Chrome allows extensions to block requests.

I think Firefox has always been able to do this.

gorhill• 12 years ago

Last week-end I introduced µBlock (or uBlock) [1] for users who do not like to deal with the more complicated HTTP Switchboard. It does rather well against other popular blockers [2], which shows that ABP does indeed block requests, not just hide HTML elements. Compare the numbers of domains reached with when no blocker is used.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#benchmarks

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#benchmarks

xkarga00• 12 years ago

Adblock official blogpost https://adblockplus.org/blog/about-that-facebook-tracking-th...

r0h1n2• 12 years ago

AdBlock Plus once blocked Google ads, till Google decided to pay them [0] to "whitelist" their ads by default. The cynical part of me sees this as a precursor for AdBlock to sign a deal with Facebook and let their ads/tracking through too, for a price of course.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/5/4496852/adblock-plus-eye-go...

mp3geek4• 12 years ago

If you want to disable the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising", that option is available.

teamhappy4• 12 years ago

Or just use the other one: https://getadblock.com/

Loughla• 12 years ago

I have adblock installed on every machine I use, and I have that unchecked. Google 'unobtrusive' ads still appear.

Ardren2• 12 years ago

AdBlock Plus wants to encourage non obtrusive advertising. Anyone can apply to have their ads/website added to the acceptable-ads whitelist. Larger companies are charged a maintenance fee.

There is a single checkbox in the options to toggle the whitelist, as well as a link to filter list being used and documentation.

Source: https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

hnha• 12 years ago

Yeah, but silent tracking in the background does not seem obstructive by their definition.

tech-no-logical4• 12 years ago

just use adblock edge :

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

r0h1n2• 12 years ago

Thanks, I already do

notastartup2• 12 years ago

and of course, it can't be installed on chrome.

almost makes me want to switch to firefox completely and use adblock-edge.

qwerta• 12 years ago

I use web less and less. It just does not have that good experience, compared to dedicated devices and apps. Also it requires constant connection, way too much hassle while traveling.

For video I use dedicated apps with off-line caching. For email I have IMAP. I get news via RSS. Anything longer than 1 page, I save and read on Kindle latter (including HN discussions). I have off-line version of Wikipedia.

daemonk• 12 years ago

Someone should make a plugin that actively sends facebook false tracking information along with your own.

surreal• 12 years ago

I seem to remember a schoolgirl developing a project to do exactly that, a few months ago on HN. Trying to dig it out now, unless anyone else can chime in?

Omniusaspirer• 12 years ago

Now that's a funny idea. Instead of just opting out you can poison the tracking info pool which basically invalidates any of the data they get even the legitimate stuff.

zo12• 12 years ago

And thereby forcing them to try figure out "who" is creating the poison data, which seems like quite a difficult problem to solve.

*Edit:typo.

malka• 12 years ago

Yeah. The data could even be pooled among some users to fuzz the stats even more, the same way some people shuffle their groceries card.

zvrba2• 12 years ago

I was seriously considering to make a browser plugin which would scrape pages for Google Analytics unique IDs, make a local database of them and randomly mix them up. Like this:

  0. [page visited]
  1. Does the page contain GA tracking ID?
    no: do nothing
    yes: add it to the database and replace it with another randomly chosen ID from the database

BillFranklin2• 12 years ago

Would pay for that.

frabcus• 12 years ago

Please do this!

marak830• 12 years ago

Haha thats great. You definatly should. Hell i think i juat found a project to screw around with this weekend!

tokenizerrr3• 12 years ago

Wouldn't referral headers give this away? Unless you change those too of course.

prezjordan• 12 years ago

IDs are tightly coupled with domains, no?

ska• 12 years ago

Sounds like a 2014 variant of emacs' "M-x spook", for tracking rather than the NSA

nikcub• 12 years ago

This is part of the better long-term solution for online privacy. Spend the effort to educate users about privacy and tracking and build easy to use software options, rather than investing time in standards that don't get adopted and are based on trust.

The voluntary standards were never going to work since the interests of the parties involved are diametrically opposed. The voluntary systems only work for the ad companies if a very small number of users take up the option and if privacy remains a niche issue. As soon as developers looked to apply DNT broadly, they baulked.

Trust is also an issue. Facebook previously said that although their share buttons are hosted on the same domain as facebook.com, meaning cookies are sent - that they are not storing or tracking user web browsing data. They now are using that data, and very little was made of the reversal.

The same reversal or business changes could turn on DNT in the same way. With DNT the sites still receive the cookies and can still store the data. They are able to comply with DNT for a period and then later reverse their position and still use the old data for targeting (and a DNT header is one more data bit that says a lot about a user).

There are now a number of competing opt out standards. None of them really work and they each have problems, but companies need to be able to say they let users opt out whenever they announce a new tech that encroaches further into our lives (Facebook use aboutads, the NAI has their own, Google has its own, most of the aggregators have their own, there are other efforts to sync opt-out).

The solution is to cut the problem off at the head and solve it with software. Browsers and that are easy to use in terms of specifying who you trust (like installing an app) and that don't ever make third-party requests by default. Now that the pretense of negotiating a solution has been dropped, effort can go into developing better software control for users and tech solutions - since none of the current offerings are perfect (which is excusable).

BillFranklin2• 12 years ago

Brilliant!

Angostura• 12 years ago

For the vast majority of sites, I am happy for them to show me ads, and also use analytics. I would however like to block Facebook tracking.

spindritf2• 12 years ago

The company opted to ignore the Do Not Track setting on Web browsers ... other Internet behemoths, including Google and Yahoo, have publicly confirmed that they also ignore Do Not Track

Am I the only one bothered by the silliness of "Do Not Track"? Or even worse, the EU cookie law?

You have a browser that leaks all kinds of info[1] about itself, tells everyone where you came from (sends referral), takes cookies from strangers like an untrained dog, making you uniquely identifiable and instead of fixing that, you ask everyone on the web to please disregard that info your browser just volunteered. How is that not completely backwards?

AdBlock, RefControl, and Disconnect, or their equivalents should be built into modern browsers. And maybe do something about the user agent, fonts, etc, too?

Don't educate users. Fix it.

[1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

ben0x5392• 12 years ago

I also walk around town completely uncamouflaged, voluntarily displaying my uniquely identifiable face and whatnot, and yet somehow most businesses can still restrain themselves and do not follow me around, colluding to enable each other to videotape my every step for analytics purpose.

Sure, there's some technical steps that can be taken but there's also a social or cultural dimension to what behavior is popularly accepted fro companies.

spindritf2• 12 years ago

Do you wear an ID around your neck? Do you walk into an establishment, introduce yourself, tell the keeper where you came from, when was the last time you visited, check in with an inter-business tracking device, and then ask them to forget all that?

This is what a browser with (or more appropriately, on) DNT is doing. Long way from camouflage.

And offline, we should also employ techniques like randomizing MAC addresses in mobile devices. Just like you lock your car even though it's illegal to jack it.

blumkvist• 12 years ago

Retail stores most definitely do follow you around and track every move you make in their store and on the parking lot.

zimbatm• 12 years ago

yet somehow most businesses can still restrain themselves and do not follow me around

Hmm no. It's just harder to do but they are working on it. Any big shop uses tons of tracking on every level. Pay by CC or use your fidelity card, facial tracking, MAC address of your phone. In London a company was providing the phone tracking service on the streets, installed on their bins, until they got shot down by the government.

mantraxD• 12 years ago

Don't you know almost every shop tracks you by your CC, and they literally put up fake wireless networks, so they can track your phone MAC address when you walk around a store?

The world on the street is exactly as cynical as the one online. It's the same world. Online it's just easier to track people even more, so they get tracked even more.

Lagged2Death• 12 years ago

It's a matter of cost/benefit to the businesses, that's all. When a business can track customers cheaply and finds the data useful, they just do it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/business/attention-shopper...

manishsharan• 12 years ago

If you use any credit card, points or frequent shoppers card or participate in loyalty program, you are being tracked. If you use a e-coupon, you are being tracked. They are not colluding -- they collect this information and had it to the data mining companies.

Why do you think the buzz around big data exists ? Its not just for curing cancer ; its mostly to track and model individual consumer behavior.

pjc50• 12 years ago

The browser giving information automatically is not trivial to fix; the vast majority of users don't want the equivalent of a UAC popup every time they try to use a web app that has session cookies, for example. So the browser gives info by default because it's useful for making certain things work.

x1798DE• 12 years ago

It seems to me that the best way to do this is to combine both approaches. There are some things you can do, but there's almost certainly going to be some clever way that people manage to circumvent these rules. One thing to consider is that the biggest threat is from the "omnipresent" companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, because they're the ones who have a 3rd party presence nearly everywhere on the web. Tracking someone's entire web history is a lot different than tracking 1 out of every 100 websites they go to, and the "big players" are the ones who are most likely to actually be scrutinized. I'm usually quite loathe to recommend any legislation, but I do think that these "big players" would likely comply with a legal requirement to respect "Do Not Track" requests, even if CoolBeanzTracker.biz would still ignore them.

In the end, I think the way forward should be to do our best to prevent our browsers from leaking such information, but also to punish people who, against our explicit wishes, take advantage of any small mistakes we make when we protect ourselves.

By analogy, it's probably not smart to go into a bad neighborhood at night alone with no protection, a large amount of cash and a flashy suit, but that doesn't mean that it's a silly thing to try and deter robberies and assaults on a societal level (either with social strategies like shaming and shunning or with violent strategies like law enforcement or retributive violence) - to the extent that it's cost-effective to do so.

zupa-hu2• 12 years ago

The Do Not Track movement says Do Not Make Money.

The entire movement is pissing against the wind. Tracking is how these companies make money. This is their motivation system. A "low" of current online physics is "tracking makes money".

As such, it's a waste of energy. Change physics first.

zupa-hu2• 12 years ago

By the way, many people make valuable content and support their work by ads. Ads are online currency. I am not using adblock because it is like stealing their work without paying.

thirsteh• 12 years ago

Not if you never click on ads anyway.

sp3323• 12 years ago

A "low" of current online physics is "tracking makes money".

That's what this fixes. By pushing back against tracking, we will force websites to use other ways to make money.

TallboyOne• 12 years ago

I can't believe how hard it is to find the link to add this...

Go to ad block settings. Add a custom one, give it any title you want. Put this in for the URL:

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/fanboy-social.txt

notastartup2• 12 years ago

I feel that Adblock is a serious threat to Facebook. If it gets the viral traction, imagine half of the Facebook users using Adblock. The result would be disastrous.

I use Adblock and love it dearly. I don't have to watch annoying ads on youtube or deal with intrusive banner ads suggesting I a guide on how to make $5000/day at home in an instant.

I do sometimes want to see ads, and that's when I google something and I want to actually see the advertisements. This is a good sign for google although overall, adblock will slowly cannibalize their ads

zhng• 12 years ago

instead of blocking, shouldn't we create extensions that make us appear as the same person on the web?

Adblock Plus gives Facebook users a way to block its extended tracking efforts

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