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

Martin Stransky stransky at redhat.com
Mon Nov 24 09:18:39 UTC 2014


On 11/23/2014 05:50 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> 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.

The Ads title looks like:

<div class="newtab-site" draggable="true" type="sponsored">
    <a class="newtab-link" title="CITIZENFOUR 
https://citizenfourfilm.com/" href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/"></a>
     <input class="newtab-control newtab-control-pin" type="button" 
title="Pin this site at its current position"></input>
     <input class="newtab-control newtab-control-block" type="button" 
title="Remove this site"></input>
     <span class="newtab-sponsored"></span>

So Mozilla provides offline thumbnail of the page and URL, nothing else. 
The ads work completely offline.

ma.


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