Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by moedersmooiste 2839 days ago
What I would like is a browser plugin/extension that jails every website in it's own cookie space. That way websites(and all trackers on that website) can only read their own cookies. Is there anything like that out there?
5 comments

Firefox containers attempts to solve this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Firefox's Facebook Container was mentioned in the article, and they have a related tool "Multi-account Containers" [0] that I think was mentioned on HN a few days ago. (Haven't tried either of them myself.)

[0]:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Facebook Container is very nice. It's curated by the development team, so you just install it and now "Pow" your Facebook is inside a Container. Like, if you click your existing Facebook bookmark, or follow an email link to a Facebook post, anything like that, the page is inside the container, but not only are your other tabs not in the container (so they don't share cookies etcetera) even the tab with Facebook in, stops being inside the container if you leave Facebook.

So long as you aren't relying on Facebook to log you into other sites, it's pretty seamless, and any edges (including that one) are consequences of the containerisation itself, they're evidence it's protecting you. For example, I pay for Youtube, so I don't see adverts, but inside the Facebook container Youtube has no idea that's me, so any Youtube videos embedded in Facebook have ads like for other users. If I leave Facebook and play the same video outside, no adverts.

Multi-account containers aren't curated (well, you do the curating) so for non-trivial sites (where they'd be most useful) you can expect to spend time tweaking things to ensure that e.g. MyBank-savings.example is inside the same container as MyBank-account.example and NewBrandFor-MyBank.example as otherwise confusing stuff can happen as the containers isolate things you actually wanted connected.

Firefox has. It screws third party logins and integration (mainly google/facebook logins) and Google’s captchas, which will be way harder than when cookies are shared.
>"It screws third party logins and integration (mainly google/facebook logins) and Google’s captchas, which will be way harder than when cookies are shared."

Could you elaborate on this? Whats the connection between shared cookies and Google's captcha intenstity? Thanks.

There was this post a discussed here a few weeks ago: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/firefox-fpi

In short, Google uses part of its behavioral data to decide beforehand how much of a captcha is needed. With no data at all you get the full blown one.

Wow, from your link:

>"As I noted only recently, Google reCAPTCHA has a 99,3 % global marketshare in CAPTCHA services.

No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA uses Google’s knowledge and insights about you from tracking you around the web to determine whether you’re a computer or a human; instead of asking you to pass a cognitive tests. Google seem to have reduced confidence in their ability to identify you as a human with reduced tracking and an unusual number of unique users (every website is assigned different tracking/user ID/user instead of sharing the same ID) from your IP address."

Google has literally become a gatekeeper for substantial part of the web. I had not seen that statistic before. I'm surprised this particular point is not discussed more. More recently I have just stopped using captchas when possible. I just won't sign up for the service. I'm not sure how else to fight this. The idea that you should penalized for trying to protect your privacy is truly reprehensible.

> It screws third party logins and integration

Sounds like a feature to me.

Have you tried google profiles. It’s not every website but you can for example organize your browsing habits such as social, entertainment, and work into unique browser profiles at least you can do this in chrome
It seems highly unlikely that Google developed a technology that allows you to stop them tracking you.
This extension does the same thing for chrome.