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0 pointsvlovich1235y ago0 comments

Or Firefox could crowdsource the building of a bloom filter of the URLs for images that are 1x1. Or you could learn 1x1 tracking locally since the set of pages you visit will probably be similar if you just want some more general protection.

The bigger problem is that anything like this and the providers go up in size 1px at a time until it’s harder to distinguish from real content (at first transparent, then positioned off-screen, then overlays hiding it, then visible in a part of the page that doesn’t get as many views, dual-purposed with images/ads already on-screen, etc).

A better way is if Firefox just bundled an ad blocker and pushed ad blocking technology forward (eg more hooks to do expensive processing natively to save on power like Safari does). The challenge though is that something like 100% of their funding comes from an ad company.

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3 comments · 3 top-level

mike-cardwell5y ago

Bloom filter wouldn't work. The bloom filter will tell you that a particular URL is "possibly" in the list. What do you do then? Reject it because it might be a tracking image?

[edit] Also, this ignores being able to:

  <iframe src="any-old-tracking-url"></iframe>
  <script src="any-old-tracking-url">
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="any-old-tracking-url">
  <img src="100px-width-tracking-image">

etc

kaba05y ago

Google pays mozilla in order to avoid a monopoly lawsuit. Just because it is good for mozilla, it doesn’t put any sort of incentive for them to follow.

dreamcompiler5y ago

What we probably need is a client-side neural net within the browser to notice that certain high information-content IMG URLs (i.e. those with random-looking garbage in the URL) from certain domains tend to result in very low information-content imagery. And that's the signature of a likely tracker.

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