tracking

(even) more privacy with Firefox Containers

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Being wary of all things tracking by Google & Facebook, both of who’s products I love but data capturing practices I hate, for the last 4 years or so I always logged in into these in “Private browsing” sessions in Firefox (because why trust the worlds biggest advertising platform with your privacy, right?)
Now I just “discovered” that the Mozilla team have rendered that somewhat clumsy procedure -which required me to log in each time I restarted my computer or browser- redundant with their “Firefox Multi-Account Containers” add-on, allowing you to contain entire sessions to one (or more) tabs;

Firefox Containers

So now I have one browser window with a couple of tabs in the Google container, one tab in a Facebook container and all others in the “default” container where Google & Facebook can’t track me (fingerprinting aside, but there’s an option for that).

Sharing widgets harm your website’s performance

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[UPDATE: I reworked lyteShare into a standalone javascript-thingie]
Doing Web Performance can be so easy, really! I was asked to do a performance analysis of a new website and one of the things I didn’t like was the fact that the footer contained social media sharing buttons using the ShareThis widget. I’m not a fan of sharing widgets in general, as they tend to slow webpage loading and rendering down and as they almost invariably come with “3rd party tracking” for behavioral marketing purposes.
So why not do a quick comparison between a simple page with ShareThis, AddThis, AddToAny/ Lockerz share and one which uses inline javascript to render the buttons? For that purpose I quickly created lyteShare, an inline JavaScript thingie that dynamically adds the Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus sharing buttons after the load event has been fired. I’m not going to bother you with code (but you can look at the page’s source here if you want)  it’s probably far from perfect and it sure isn’t pretty, but it works and the webpagetest.org-results tell it all.

ShareThisAddThisLockerz/ AddToAnyinline JS (“lyteShare”)
Document Complete0.677s0.487s1.352s0.283s
Start Render0.715s0.279s0.304s0.298s
Fully Loaded1.507s3.718s1.407s0.500s
Full Download size70 KB384 KB 111 KB7 KB
Test Reportsharethis resultaddthis result lockerz/ addtoany resultlyteshare result
3rd party tracking?yes yes yesno

So yep, ShareThis, AddThis  and AddToAny/ Lockerz (and all sharing widgets really) are performance-hogs that also track your visitors’ every move while offering little or no added value to what anyone could do with some simple JavaScript (or server-side code, for that matter).
Conclusion: if performance is of any importance for your website (and it should be), you really have to avoid using 3rd party widgetery!

Jetpack Notifications puts Quantcast tracking in your WordPress Admin

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WP DoNotTrack user Marco Donati asked why the plugin did not stop Quantcast from being included in the WordPress admin pages. After some research (with the kind assistance of Marco), I discovered not one but two problems;
WP DoNotTrack relies on “output buffering” in WordPress to filter/ modify the HTML when in “Forced (default)” or “SuperClean” mode. Apparently WordPress does not use output buffering in the admin-pages, so WP DoNotTrack did not get triggered. My bad! I’ve updated the code to fallback to “Normal” mode when in admin and will push out a new version with this fix soon.
But then it got slightly ugly; even with this fix in place, the Quantcast-tracker kept on appearing! It was being called from within an iFrame, outside the reach of WP DoNotTrack. The culprit turned out to be the brand new “Jetpack Notifications” feature which -as most of Jetpack- is activated by default. As from Jetpack 1.9, you’ll see a small icon next to the greeting text on the right side of the admin-bar. When you click that icon a drop-down appears which contains the iFrame and the tracking code. To disable, in “Notifications” click on “Learn more” to reveal the “Disable”-button. Click that one and the icon, iFrame and tracker code are gone. Good riddance!
My advice to Jetpack users; explicitly disable any feature you do not use. Jetpack might offer some nice functionality, but of that is available in other plugins as well and being tied in that heavily into wordpress.com does come at a price. Moreover it seems there are some security concerns; as an user with author permissions I had access to the Jetpack overview page and I was able to activate the “Jetpack Comments” feature on Marco’s blog, but I couldn’t disable it. Call me a paranoid security-zealot, but non-administrator users should not really be able to do that, should they?

WP DoNotTrack 0.6.0 and beyond

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I finally found some time to continue to work my other WordPress plugin. WP DoNotTrack checks for elements being added to the DOM by JavaScript to stop 3rd party tracking by some of the major plugins or themes.

Version 0.6.0, which I released last week, features a new “forced” option. This mode aims to provide better compatibility with JavaScript-optimizing plugins such as Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache by adding the relevant code only after those optimizers have done their job, using the output buffer. There will probably be a 0.6.1 today or tomorrow, to solve a small problem with mixed HTTP/HTTPS requests on the admin-page while in HTTPS. The output buffer sure is a powerful thing and for version 0.7.0, I’ll build on that to optionally filter the full HTML (with PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser) to stop unwanted requests for images, scripts or iFrames in there.

Do contact me if you found a bug, if you have questions or if you’d like specific feature to be added, I tend to rely heavily on user feedback to improve my plugins! And if you’re happy with how it works, drop by on the WP DoNotTrack-page on wordpress.org to rate it and/ or to confirm it works with your version of WordPress!

AddToAny now includes Lockerz tracking

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Update 02-2015: things change, blogposts get out of date and indeed A2A is not owned by Lockerz any more.
AddToAny, one of the most popular sharing-widgets around, has had 3rd party tracking by Media6degrees for quite some time already. I wasn’t too happy about that, but it did have the no_3p option to disable this “functionality”. Half a year ago however AddToAny was acquired by Lockerz.com and it now includes tracking by Lockerz.com which cannot be turned off and does not check for navigator.doNotTrack either.
I’ve contacted the developer (Pat’s a swell guy, really) and he answered he would look into honoring the DoNotTrack header, which he wrote he’d love to include in Q1 somewhere. In the mean time, if you have AddToAny on your site, you can already hide the Lockerz “Earn” tab. And if you’re on WordPress, you could install (or upgrade) WP DoNotTrack, which I’ve updated to stop the Lockerz tracking (make sure lockerz.com is your blacklist).
If there’s a Drupalista out there that uses AddToAny and would like to stop Lockerz tracking; I’d be happy to co-author a Drupal DoNotTrack module, do get in touch!

Configure WP DoNotTrack to block what you want

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I pushed out a major new version of WP DoNotTrack to the WordPress plugin repository and major in this case means:

  • you can now choose between a blacklist and whitelist-approach (previous version did blacklisting only)
  • define what exactly is in that black- or whitelist (previous version came with a hardcoded blacklist)
  • option to block javascript-initiated tracking code from being added for all your visitors, or just those that explicitly opted out of tracking in their browser (supported in MS IE9 and Firefox 9, not supported in Google Chrome)
  • and off course an option-page under wp-admin to change all these settings

Because of these new features (4 of them) and because I think the plugin is already at least 50% mature, I decided to bump the version from 0.1.0 to 0.5.0. Never been good at math anyway …
If you encounter any problems when installing or configuring this plugin, you might find valuable info in the FAQ. But here’s two tips anyway:

  1. In general caching and js-aggregating plugins can interfere, so you might want to disable those while working on your WP DoNotTrack configuration and re-enable (with cleared caches) once you’re satisfied with the result.
  2. If you’re running WP YouTube Lyte with the bonus “donottrack” feature activated, you’ll want to deactivate that before installing/ activating WP DoNotTrack. If you don’t do that, you’ll have to turn to the FAQ …

Don’t hesitate to contact me or leave a comment beneath this here little blogpost if you run into problems, if have a feature request or if you just want to chat a little. I just love receiving feedback!

Why your WordPress blog needs DoNotTrack

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So what’s with all that nagging about tracking and that DoNotTrack plugin, you might wonder? Well, it’s pretty simple actually.

  1. Some very popular WordPress plugins include 3rd party tracking, sometimes even without properly disclosing, often without means to disable this behavior
  2. 3rd party tracking has privacy implications: all your visitors are tracked by the 3rd party, in general for behavioral marketing purposes (depending on what data is captured, tracking might even be illegal in some countries)
  3. 3rd party tracking has a performance impact: every visit to your blog will include between 2 and 5 extra requests for the 3rd party tracking to succeed, effectively delaying full page rendering

It is my conviction that blog owners should be able to install and use WordPress plugins without having to worry about undisclosed tracking and that plugins should provide a way to disable such 3rd party tracking if included.
As this is not the case yet, we have to resort to (messy) solutions to stop unwanted tracking from happening. And that’s exactly what DoNotTrack does. It’s a small javascript-hack in a WordPress-plugin to stop 3rd party tracking introduced by some of the most popular plugins.
Some details from the readme.txt:

  • What works:
  • What does not work (yet): Tracking code added using innerHTML or appendChild/insertBefore is not yet intercepted (but I’m working a solution for that)
  • What else might be added:
  • How you can help:
    • Provide me with links to plugins that include browser-based tracking + domain where the tracking is done.
    • Provide me with known opt-out code (javascript) to disable tracking services on a site.
    • Tell plugin writers you’re not happy with 3rd party tracking!
    • Tell your visitors about tracking & privacy, link to e.g. http://www.privacychoice.org/

And remember: if you host your WordPress blog yourself, you and nobody else should be able to decide who tracks your users!