Mozilla enabled ads in Firefox and they're active in Fedora

[Nikos Roussos]

On 11/23/2014 06:50 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 4:17 AM, Nikos Roussos
> <comzeradd at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> On 11/18/2014 08:24 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>> On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 3:54 PM, Nikos Roussos
>>> <comzeradd at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>>> On 11/16/2014 08:24 PM, Christopher wrote:
>>>>> On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 6:46 AM, Mustafa Muhammad
>>>>> <mustafaa.alhamdaani at gmail.com <mailto:mustafaa.alhamdaani at gmail.com>>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> This doesn't seem relevant to this discussion, unless Fedora browsers
>>>>> are automatically, and without the user's explicit knowledge or
>>>>> permission, navigating to Google's search engine, which (AFAICT) they
>>>>> are not.
>>>>
>>>> Same happens with these tiles. No data is sent back to Mozilla unless
>>>> you *choose* to click one of the promoted tiles.
>>>
>>> Even if not sent to Mozilla, it's accessible to the advertisers. I
>>> could spend a long time explaining the various means, that web
>>> advertisers track their users, ranging from crafting URL's and
>>> metadata about the particular requests to 'web bugs', those little one
>>> pixel transparent gifs so ubiquitous on the plethora of
>>> ad.doublelick.net websites with fake names used to collect the data.
>>
>> The tiles are coming from Mozilla. So yes please explain how the
>> advertisers can track me through them if I don't click them.
> 
> Much depends on what's in the tile. For example an embedded 1 pixel
> transparent gif, commonly known as a "web bug", and loaded from a
> third party web repository such as one of the many misleading aliases
> for ad.doubleclick.net, is one of the favorites. Another is crafting
> the URL used by the displayed advertising page to contain metadata
> about the browsing client. Unless the tiles are vetted by, hosted by,
> and have their content reviewed and manually sanitized by someone both
> paranoid and content over at Mozilla, it's safe to assume there is
> tracking information embedded in the tiles. The tracking information
> has become ubiquitous in far too much web content, especially in paid
> advertising content.
> 
> I'm afraid it's not reasonable to assume that just because Mozilla is
> providing the hooks to publish web ads that those web ads do not,
> themselves, collect and use personal user data, especially the client
> IP and browsing history.

You don't have to assume. Firefox is open source so you can just check
the code before spreading FUD.


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