Hacker News Reader

Comment by malikNF | Hacker News Reader

While I like the idea of not having to deal with these annoying ReCAPTCHA prompts, something somehow feels "intrusive ?". I mean does this mean google is going to keep track of what I would be doing when I visit a site?

Say for instance I am signing up for a website, does the password I enter get sent to google servers to be analyzed now?

View on HN

>I mean does this mean google is going to keep track of what I would be doing when I visit a site?

Oh buddy, I have bad news for you...

https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/1716364?hl=en

https://www.google.com/analytics/#?modal_active=none

https://www.doubleclickbygoogle.com/solutions/measurement/

Wow, I never heard of Pixel Tracking. That sounds super evil. Are there browser plugins to fight back on this one?

Adblockers such as uBlock already block many of these since they're hosted by ad agencies. If someone is determined they can bypass the filter easily though; you'd need a static filter for each of these then. The only global solution would be to block all remote images which would likely break many websites. Also, nowadays so many sophisticated tracking methods exist I'm not sure it's worth the hassle.

Check out Ghostery.

My standard internet security suite is ublock origin, noscript, self-destructing cookies, privacy badger and httpseverywhere.

Privacybadger does an ok job against tracking pixels. It uses machine learning to try to detect when a specific url or domain seems to be "following" you around the internet, which could indicate a tracking pixel among other things. It then blocks these entities and gives you the option to override.

And yes, I do think tracking pixels are super evil. It could be standard for websites to have a bar at the bottom with little logos[1] showing the companies that are tracking you, with the logos being the remote-loaded content. The fact that these companies feel compelled to make it 1x1 transparent pixels tells me very clearly that they know they are doing something people don't want them to do, because they've gone out of their way to hide it. It's a clear misuse of browser capabilities, yet they do it anyway. What a pack of cunts they are.

[1] or textual short names company ticker style if you want to minimize bandwidth

I use RequestPolicy. It prevents a web-site to call another web-site unless I allow.

They're an even bigger thing in emails. Usually, companies would include a pixel from an external resource and then figure out if you've read the email or not by looking at was that image loaded or not.

IIRC, GitHub does that. If you read the email of some notification, it won't show you that notification in your notifications. The solution is to block external image loading in your email client (I know that Thunderbird has that, and I know that Zoho's email client on Android has that).

Gmail does something to divert it - it downloads all the resources once and CDNs them for you, so the email author can't see who and where opened the email.

Yep, tracking pixels are among the oldest forms of internet surveillance, predating the far more aggressive and intrusive JavaScript companies use today. They're one of the reasons why most mail clients don't load images by default. They only give information on page loads, not obsessive behavior tracking, but they're harder to block.

They're why I block doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com, etc. in my hosts file rather than just blocking their JavaScript.

It's just one more of the many elements of Google puzzle. They control most web searches, GA is a de facto standard of web analytics, Gmail is the most popular mail service, not to mention other free services, Android etc. etc., Google can easily track you all the way from the moment you open your browser (likely, Chrome...), through your searches, visits and actions. It's high time people realized giving so much power to one company, just for short-time convenience, is extremely dangerous. Google might have benevolent management now, but this can easily change, and it scary to think what could happen then.

The saving grace here is that there are alternatives for all those services and I can switch pretty easily at any time so honestly it's less urgent to me

don't they already? Almost everyone uses Google analytics and most websites that have ad placements use the Google network. Where do you think the data for those comes from?

I expect to see more people putting recaptchas in their login screens, which means even more data funneled to google (after NSA i guess).

if javascript is enabled, it should be trivial to detect a human... (but of course they can log everything)

You don't give bot authors enough credit. They can run JavaScript too and try to replicate human behavior.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com