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mcc

@dmarti @thomholwerda Maybe a good first step would be a browser extension that just identifies whether "please phone home later" codes of Google, Apple, or Firefox/Facebook formats are seen and which ones. I think it would be interesting to do a survey of popular websites and identify which of these are making use of the "ad measurement"/browser phonehome capabilities.

4 comments
mcc

@dmarti @thomholwerda This entire technology class and the details of its implementation have been way under-reported even in webtech blogs, which normally are falling over themselves to give tutorials on every new browser feature. It's weird considering that theoretically this technology is useless unless somewhere an engineer with a website implements it (maybe there's a separate adtech information ecosystem I don't read?)

Don Marti

@mcc @thomholwerda For the Google stuff you don't need an extension, you can check for an attestation file under .well-known

developers.google.com/privacy-

(just going by market share that seems like it will be the most common one—so far it looks like the Firefox ad tracking feature has resulted in more fediverse+Reddit+Hacker News+LWN posts than actual ads)

mcc

@dmarti @thomholwerda According to Firefox the "ad measurement" feature in 128.0 is not generally available yet. It's locked behind this thing wiki.mozilla.org/Origin_Trials which means each site using the feature has to be individually approved. I don't know if Firefox publishes the lists of who's enabled for which origin trials. They assert the feature is only for "experiments" about whether the feature gathers useful data, but I'd be very curious if Facebook sites are among the ones "experimenting".

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