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Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

I clicked, read "Quetta does not collect, store or share any data." , but then:

> The resource at “https://stats.g.doubleclick.net/g/collect?[truncated]” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.

(also their account identifier is "11l1l1l1l1", an attempt to anonymize their own advertising account? Seems legit)

> Request to access cookie or storage on “https://analytics.google.com/g/collect?[truncated]” was blocked because it came from a tracker and content blocking is enabled.

Plus hits to Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Framer's events API logging page views...

I get that this stuff is "standard", but you can't say "privacy-first" and then track every visitor to your site with like 3-4 different analytics platforms.

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Mozilla does the same thing. Their website is loaded with trackers, and for security reasons, parts of their website can't be controlled by addons like uBlock.

I have a strong suspicion their "install Firefox on your smart thermostat" popups that show up every time it updates itself are also part of their tracking solution, because there's no easy way to opt out of those and they sure contain a boatload of trackers.

While I don't really trust the company behind it, Brave seems to be the one browser that doesn't insist on packing their stuff full of trackers.

I just went to getfirefox.com (with no ad-blocking or anything). There are no hits to any Google or Doubleclick domain. In fact, there are also no XHR's or GETs to tracking APIs either, that I can see. Not sure what you're referring to, but this is the most privacy-respecting webpage I've been to in a long time.

Same thing going to mozilla.org . I'm not seeing any tiny hint of what you're describing.

Well, I'll be damned, they actually removed their trackers! That's great to see!

I still get URLs like https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/.../whatsnew/?oldversi...... opening up with every update, though, despite having everything under "Firefox Data Collection and Use" disabled. I don't know what data this request is logging (seems to be just "firefox-desktop", oldversion and the new version, but I can't tell if they track anything else (language, IP address, etc.). I wish I could just disable these popups without digging through about:config (which I thought I had already done).

This is entirely false, you must be blocking the requests on the network level or something.

For one the getfirefox.com redirect includes tracking parameters in the destination URL, then there's Google Tag Manager, there is Sentry, some pages with their first party analytics solutions like Glean and more.

I installed uBlock Origin, with my Privacy settings set to normal/default, and there is nothing blocked (normally the plugin would show a long list of blocked analytics stuff). No clue, are you using Firefox as well? Not sure what the difference is with our experiences, but I see not a shred of Google or analytics-related network requests when I navigate to getfirefox.com . It DOES have a query param in the destination URL that suggests tracking, but it never does anything with it (???) https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/?redirect_source=g... ... I'm investigating further and I see that the page itself loads a self-hosted Google Tag Manager .js, but it looks like it has code that respects the "do not track" setting in my browser, but oddly I don't even have that enabled (woops)! Strange, no idea what's different for me. I'll try on another machine just to compare!

That's interesting, I'm indeed seeing some differences between browsers on those pages but those aren't exactly baseline setups. I'll have to do a more thorough comparison tomorrow and will reply with my findings.

Having some issues with the system I want to use for these tests. Expecting to get this done over the weekend.

Exactly. Analytics isn’t even intrinsically bad. There are so many privacy-friendly analytics tools today (Fathom, Plausible, etc), and lots of them can even be self hosted.

Saying you don’t collect data, then using Google for data collection is very disingenuous.

Is “privacy” the new buzzword? Seems like with “AI” before it, privacy is being thrown around by startups as a way to pad landing pages and attract naive users.

> Is “privacy” the new buzzword?

It is not new. It is going on since some years. A lot of companies (hello Microsoft) say that they care about your privacy, while collecting every piece of it.

Piracy isn't a new buzzword but ever since Apple made it a selling point everyone is hopping on the train.

Also when it comes to privacy there's a thin line between collecting data and selling it to partners.

The privacy laws are new(ish), which is what makes companies even consider the privacy side of things nowadays.

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