> Keep in mind that blocking fingerprinting may cause some sites to break.
This represents the sad state of Internet we are all living through. I have noticed that when I turn on privacy settings on Firefox, some major websites are broken and rendered unusable. It seems that the Internet is rampant with tracking and privacy violation, and we consumers are passively accepting it, by and large.
> I have noticed that when I turn on privacy settings on Firefox, some major websites are broken
In some cases it is because Firefox's tracking protection is based off of a curated list of websites [1]. This breaks a site I built called reVddit [2].
In my uneducated opinion, this list is weird. I had some discussion about this with Mozilla devs [3]. In that message chain, devs acknowledged reVddit is not doing anything wrong, rather it is reddit who could infringe users' privacy. Yet it is the non-infringing site that is rendered broken.
Further, the devs' suggestions for remedy are not workable. They propose moving requests to the server so that reVddit.com makes the requests to reddit.com. There are multiple problems with this,
* It would hide more code from users
* Reddit rate-limits requests coming from a single source
* Infrastructure becomes expensive on what is supposed to be a low cost website
My conversation with devs was good but needs more. I don't understand their point and they do not seem to understand mine.
I haven't had an issue, but I avoid "major websites" like the plague, as they are the modern equivalent (though measles is making a comeback). If a site breaks with good privacy settings, it's a decent indicator you're better off not visiting. If a breaking site shows up on my radar too much, I add the domain to an add-on I made to hide links to it on any page. My HN/reddit/search results/etc views usually have a few blank lines, they're links to domains I have determined I never want to visit ever again. My RSS reader gets a variation of the filter, so they don't show up there either. It feels really good to have the power to remove an entire site from my personal internet.
I published it [1], but only because I had to in order to use it without adding and approving it every time I started Firefox :/ I originally thought I had made the source available but eventually realized the code repo on Mozilla was only available to me (not sure what the point of that is). You just inspired me to get it up on github [2].
It's a pain to configure but the example JSON in the "Preferences" section of the add-on should be enough to get started. Just paste it into the textarea, save, then visit HN or Reddit, you'll probably see a few blank lines where links should be.
Right now, the top post on HN is a WSJ link. I don't want to see their links because I don't ever want to click them just to hit a paywall I already know I'll never accept. So my HN page looks like this [3].
The tool uses regular expressions on text and element attribute values. Anything that matches gets a given CSS style applied. I think it would be great if uBlock Origin could do this but it doesn't allow the level of granularity needed to accomplish the end result.
This represents the sad state of Internet we are all living through. I have noticed that when I turn on privacy settings on Firefox, some major websites are broken and rendered unusable. It seems that the Internet is rampant with tracking and privacy violation, and we consumers are passively accepting it, by and large.