Mozilla has a petition asking Facebook to stop tracking people's browsing off the site unless they opt in to it. Frankly I think the solution is to remove the ability to track people across sites from the web entirely, but I signed the petition anyway. Facebook has taken a huge hit to their reputation, so now is a good time to be putting pressure on them to change their ways.
@seanl Technically, how could this capability be removed?
@woozle So far it's been primarily through tools like Privacy Badger and Multi-Account Containers. Privacy Badger at least should come with the browser and be on by default. It's essentially what Apple's now building in to Safari (the Privacy Badger functionality at least).
Tracking needs to be opt-in. Europe's "We use cookies, opt in or fuck off" is utterly worthless. We need laws against non-opt-in tracking, not laws forcing web sites to tell people meaningless things.
> We need laws against non-opt-in tracking
This gets tricky, and could easily penalize operators of small sites. E.g. it's almost impossible to have a login system without cookies, but how do you legally distinguish between cookies and tracking? If it's "using cookies from another site via iframes", then how do you distinguish between that and 3rd-party auth frames?
Large operators have legal teams to keep things clear...
@woozle Ah I should have said cross-site tracking, and the laws should explicitly allow collecting and storing such information for login and abuse prevention. For on-site tracking, laws could just limit what the information can be used for and how long it can be retained.