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Comment by 1f60c | Hacker News Reader

Am I reading this wrong or are the browser vendors making it seem like this is a good feature for privacy?

The argument is that it's privacy neutral since this kind of tracking can already happen with JS or no JS with redirects both of which are widely deployed already.

* There's now a spec/standard for the data exchange.

* Users get faster websites, can see the actual destination URL on hover, and maybe a slight security improvement in the event that the server component performing the tracking redirects is compromised.

* It's easier to find the ping attributes on links than untangle all the JS on a page.

* For extension developers this actually increases privacy (assuming it's adopted en mass) because now you can just remove all the ping attributes on links rather than unbind click handlers which might end up breaking the page.

End users can at least disable JS to solve JS-based privacy concerns. So the act of removing methods to disable this is at least a tiny bit on the anti-privacy side of things.

There still needs to be a way for people to disable it.

Without knowing the specifics, I think it's one instance where any variance from the default, when intentionally set by an user, is an additional signal for fingerprinting.

(It's becoming a nice excuse to clamp down on configurability, without considering if the APIs really should be available to authors.)

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