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[Link Posting] Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk

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  [Link Posting] Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2019-04-07 14:11 +0000
    Re: [Link Posting] Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> - 2019-04-07 16:10 +0100
      Re: [Link Posting] Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2019-04-07 17:03 +0000
        Re: [Link Posting] Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2019-04-08 01:38 +0000
        Re: [Link Posting] Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk Jerry Peters <jerry@example.invalid> - 2019-04-08 20:15 +0000
          Re: [Link Posting] Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2019-04-08 22:28 +0000
    Re: [Link Posting] Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.net> - 2019-04-07 17:25 +0000
    Re: [Link Posting] Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk Batchman <batchman@dosville.foo> - 2019-04-08 21:04 +0000

#17782 — [Link Posting] Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk

      ####################################################################
      # ATTENTION: This post is a reference to a website.  The poster of #
      # this Usenet article is not the author of the referenced website. #
      ####################################################################

<URL:https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/major-browsers-to-pr
event-disabling-of-click-tracking-privacy-risk/>

The text below is a quotation from the URL above:
>
>  A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track
>  link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and
>  Microsoft Edge, but will soon have no way to disable it. As it is
>  considered a privacy risk, browsers previously allowed you to disable
>  this feature. Now they are going in the opposite direction.
>
>  Hyperlink auditing is a HTML standard that allows the creation of
>  special links that ping back to a specified URL when they are clicked
>  on. These pings are done in the form of a POST request to the specified
>  web page that can then examine the request headers to see what page the
>  link was clicked on.
>
>  To create a hyperlink auditing URL, you can simply create a normal
>  hyperlink HTML tag, but also include a ping="[url]" variable as shown
>  below.
>
>  This will render on the page as a normal link to google.com and if you
>  hover over it, will only show you the destination URL. It does not show
>  you the ping back URL of https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/pong.php, so
>  users will not even realize this is happening unless they examine the
>  sites source code.
>
>  When a user clicks on the above link, the browser will first send a POST
>  request back to the ping URL https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/pong.php
>  as shown below. It will then open the www.google.com page. This means
>  that everytime a user clicks on a hyperlink audited link, the browser
>  will make two requests instead of one.
>
>  ...

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#17783

Rich quoted:

> A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track
> link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and
> Microsoft Edge, but will soon have no way to disable it.

I thought hardly any sites got their pings that way, mostly hitting some 
form of script on their own server to log the hit and redirect to the 
target?

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#17784

Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
> Rich quoted:
> 
>> A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track
>> link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and
>> Microsoft Edge, but will soon have no way to disable it.
> 
> I thought hardly any sites got their pings that way, mostly hitting some 
> form of script on their own server to log the hit and redirect to the 
> target?

Most seem to use either a JS on-click handler or simply point at their 
own site and feed a redirect back to the browser.

This looks like an attempt by the standards bodies to provide a garden 
standard way to do the tracking, without needing 75 different JS libs 
or miss-using redirects for tracking purposes.

Which is a reasonable goal, providing a single standard way to do those 
things that a load of different, often incompatible with various 
browsers, ways that exist now.

But forgetting that this is *my computer*, and it is running *my 
browser*, and that *I* should have the final say in whether this 
happens or not, is the issue here.

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#17788

In comp.misc, Rich  <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
> But forgetting that this is *my computer*, and it is running *my 
> browser*, and that *I* should have the final say in whether this 
> happens or not, is the issue here.

If it's your browser, then it has a switch to disable this or even lacks
the code to do it, right? 

Elijah
------
a good html editing proxy would be quite nice to have

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#17790

Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
> Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
>> Rich quoted:
>> 
>>> A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track
>>> link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and
>>> Microsoft Edge, but will soon have no way to disable it.
>> 
>> I thought hardly any sites got their pings that way, mostly hitting some 
>> form of script on their own server to log the hit and redirect to the 
>> target?
> 
> Most seem to use either a JS on-click handler or simply point at their 
> own site and feed a redirect back to the browser.
> 
> This looks like an attempt by the standards bodies to provide a garden 
> standard way to do the tracking, without needing 75 different JS libs 
> or miss-using redirects for tracking purposes.
> 
> Which is a reasonable goal, providing a single standard way to do those 
> things that a load of different, often incompatible with various 
> browsers, ways that exist now.
> 
> But forgetting that this is *my computer*, and it is running *my 
> browser*, and that *I* should have the final say in whether this 
> happens or not, is the issue here.

Palemoon still has the setting 'browser.send_pings' which defaults to
false. So it seems FF its derived browsers still support user choice
in the matter.

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#17792

Jerry Peters <jerry@example.invalid> wrote:
> 
> Palemoon still has the setting 'browser.send_pings' which defaults to
> false. So it seems FF its derived browsers still support user choice
> in the matter.

Yes, along with Brave, as noted at the end of the original article.

I was relieved to see that, though I still wouldn't put it past FF to
jump on the bandwagon at some point and at least start enabling it by
default.

-- 
__          __
#_ < |\| |< _#

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#17785

>>>>> Rich <rich@example.invalid> writes:
>>>>> "BC" == http://bleepingcomputer.com/ writes:

	[Cross-posting to news:comp.infosystems.www.misc.]

 > <URL:https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/major-browsers-to
 > -prevent-disabling-of-click-tracking-privacy-risk/>

 BC> A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track
 BC> link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and
 BC> Microsoft Edge, but will soon have no way to disable it.  As it is
 BC> considered a privacy risk, browsers previously allowed you to
 BC> disable this feature.  Now they are going in the opposite direction.

 BC> Hyperlink auditing is a HTML standard

	Wait a minute; like, a W3C standard?  You know, the body that
	represents the interests of all the WWW users -- such as Google,
	Netflix, and the rest of the gang?

	Yeah, I'm surprised beyond belief that they have such a privacy
	threat standardized, and that that same Google is going out of
	their way to disallow opting-out.  After all, their users' best
	interests are at the stake.  Financial ones, too.

[...]

PS.  Can we have a community hypertext markup standard already?  Please?

-- 
FSF associate member #7257  http://am-1.org/~ivan/

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#17791

On Sun, 07 Apr 2019 14:11:58 +0000, Rich wrote:

> 
> <URL:https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/major-browsers-to-pr
> event-disabling-of-click-tracking-privacy-risk/>
> 
> The text below is a quotation from the URL above:
>>
>>  A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track
>>  link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and
[SNIP]

Thanks for your post!

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