But for quick-and-easy free protection at popular Web sites, HTTPS Everywhere is a great choice. Note: This link automatically installs the file from the developer's site into your Firefox browser. Download Https-Everywhere HTTPS Everywhere - A Browser Extension That Encrypts Your Communications With Many Websites That Offer HTTPS But Still Allow Unencrypted Connections Reviewed by Zion3R on 6:00 PM Rating: 5.
Criteo is an ad company. You may not have heard of them, but they do retargeting, the type of ads that pursue users across the web, beseeching them to purchase a product they once viewed or have already bought. To identify users across websites, Criteo relies on cross-site tracking using cookies and other methods to follow users as they browse. This has led them to try and circumvent the privacy features in Apple's Safari browser which protects its users from such tracking. Despite this apparently antagonistic attitude towards user privacy, Criteo has also been whitelisted by the Acceptable Ads initiative. This means that their ads are unblocked by popular adblockers such as Adblock and Adblock Plus. Criteo pays Eyeo, the operator of Acceptable Ads, for this whitelisting and must comply with their format requirements. But this also means they can track any user of these adblockers who has not disabled Acceptable Ads, even if they have installed privacy tools such as EasyPrivacy with the intention of protecting themselves. EFF is concerned about Criteo's continued anti-privacy actions and their continued inclusion in Acceptable Ads.
Safari Shuts out Third Party Cookies..
All popular browsers give users control over who gets to set cookies, but Safari is the only one that blocks third-party cookies (those set by a domain other than the site you are visiting) by default. (Safari's choice is important because only 5-10% of users ever change default settings in software.) Criteo relies on third-party cookies. Since users have little reason to visit Criteo's own website, the company gets its cookies onto users' machines through its integration on many online retail websites. Safari's cookie blocking is a major problem for Criteo, especially given the large and lucrative nature of iPhone's user base. Rather than accept this, Criteo has repeatedly implemented ways to defeat Safari's privacy protections.
One workaround researchers detected Criteo using was to redirect users from sites where their service was present to their own. For example, if you visited wintercoats.com and clicked on a product category, you would be first diverted to criteo.com and then redirected to wintercoats.com/down-filled. Although imperceptible to the user, this detour was enough to persuade the browser that criteo.com is a site you chose to visit, and therefore a first party entitled to set a cookie rather than a third party. Criteo applied for a patent on this method in August 2013.
..And Closes the Backdoor
Luma no plugin detected. Last summer, however, Apple unveiled a new version of Safari with more sophisticated cookie handling—called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP)—which killed off the redirect technique as a means to circumvent the cookie controls. The browser now analyzes if the user has engaged with a website in a meaningful way before allowing it to set a cookie. The announcement triggered panic among advertising companies, whose trade association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, denounced the feature and rushed out technical recommendations to work around it. Obviously the level of user 'interaction' with Criteo during the redirect described above fails ITP's test, which meant Criteo was locked out again.
It appears that Criteo's response was to abandon cookies for Safari users and to generate a persistent identifier by piggybacking on a key user safety technology called HSTS. When a browser connects to a site via HTTPS (i.e. a site that supports encryption), the site can respond with an HTTP Strict Transport Security policy (HSTS), instructing the browser to only contact it using HTTPS. Without a HSTS policy, your browser might try to connect to the site over regular old unencrypted HTTP in the future—and thus be vulnerable to a downgrade attack. Criteo used HSTS to sneak data into the browser cache to produce an identifier it could use to recognize the individual's browser and profile them. This approach relied on the fact that it is difficult to clear HSTS data in Safari, requiring the user to purge the cache entirely to delete the identifier. For EFF, it is especially worrisome that Criteo used a technique that pits privacy protection against user security interests by targeting HSTS. Use of this mechanism was documented by Gotham City Research, an investment firm who have bet against Criteo's stock.
In early December, Apple released an update to iOS and Safari which disabled Criteo's ability to exploit HSTS. This led to Criteo revising down their revenue forecasts and a sharp fall in their share price.
How is Criteo 'Acceptable Advertising'?
Criteo styles itself as a leader in privacy practices, yet they have dedicated significant engineering resources to circumventing privacy tools. They claim to have obtained user consent to tracking based on a minimal warning delivered in what we believe to be a highly confusing context. When a user first visits a site containing Criteo's script, they received a small notice stating, 'Click any link to use Criteo's cross-site tracking technology.' If the user continues to use the site, they are deemed to have consented. Little wonder that Criteo can boast of a low opt-out rate to their clients.
Due to their observed behaviour prior to the ITP episode, Criteo's incorporation into the Acceptable Ads in December 2015 aroused criticism among users of ad blockers. We have written elsewhere about how Acceptable Ads creates a clash of interests between adblocking companies and their users, especially those concerned with their privacy. But Criteo's participation in Acceptable Ads brings into focus the substantive problem with the program itself. The criteria for Acceptable Ads are concerned chiefly with format and aesthetic aspects (e.g. How big is the ad? How visually intrusive? Does it blink?) and excludes privacy concerns. Retargeting is unpopular and mocked by users, in part because it wears its creepy tracking practices on its sleeve. Our view is that Criteo's bad behavior should exclude its products from being deemed 'acceptable' in any way.
The fact that the Acceptable Ads Initiative has approved Criteo's user-tracking-by-misusing-security-features ads is indicative of the privacy problems we believe to be at the heart of the Acceptable Ads program. In March this year, Eyeo announced an Acceptable Ads Committee that will control the criteria for Acceptable Ads in the future. The Committee should start by instituting a rule which excludes companies that circumvent explicit privacy tools or exploit user security technologies for the purpose of tracking.
- 1.http://criteo.investorroom.com/download/Transcript_Q3+2017+Earnings_EDITED.pdf
Ever since mid-2017, Apple has been tackling web tracking in a big way. Various iterations of its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) technology have been introduced over the past few years in WebKit, the browser engine for Safari. ITP already protects users from tracking in various ways, but it left open a number of questions about the guidelines it uses to determine just who Apple considers a tracker, and what behavior is indicative of tracking. Last week, Apple answered these questions with its WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy, which also includes an extraordinary and newsworthy clause:
We treat circumvention of shipping anti-tracking measures with the same seriousness as exploitation of security vulnerabilities.
Treating Trackers like Hackers?
The past decade has seen companies taking product security increasingly seriously. Apple announced its own bug bounty program in 2016 with a maximum pay-out of $200,000. Yet a certain privacy nihilism has prevailed when it comes to companies brokering our personal information. Both big-name social media companies such as Facebook and little-known targeted advertisers such as Criteo have been using a wide variety of techniques to siphon our personal information, including advanced techniques such as fingerprinting and exploiting browser login managers. Until recently, privacy advocates were making precious little headway in convincing browsers to prioritize anti-tracking. This statement by Apple (inspired by a similar anti-tracking policy for Firefox introduced by Mozilla earlier in the year) sends a strong message to trackers: we have zero tolerance for attempts to extract user information without their consent. We applaud Apple for taking this strong stance for user privacy.
Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP)
Even before ITP, Apple had been blocking 3rd party cookies and using cache partitioning to mitigate the effects of 3rd party resource cache-based tracking. ITP uses a number of novel techniques to stymie the efforts of trackers even further. For example, it expires cookies when users haven't interacted with a website for 30 days. It uses the Storage Access API which requires meaningful interaction between a user and third-party services before the service is allowed to access its first-party cookies. This means that a 3rd-party service (or a tracker) won't be able to access a stateful, cross-site, persistent identifier in the form of a cookie that they've stored on your browser unless you've actually, say, clicked on that 'like' button. And without that identifier, they'll have a hard time linking your visit to `site-with-a-like-button.com` to your Facebook account. ITP most recently also expires cookies that have been set via link decoration. All this amounts to an impressive and powerful set of tracking protections for Safari users.
The past decade has seen companies taking product security increasingly seriously. Apple announced its own bug bounty program in 2016 with a maximum pay-out of $200,000. Yet a certain privacy nihilism has prevailed when it comes to companies brokering our personal information. Both big-name social media companies such as Facebook and little-known targeted advertisers such as Criteo have been using a wide variety of techniques to siphon our personal information, including advanced techniques such as fingerprinting and exploiting browser login managers. Until recently, privacy advocates were making precious little headway in convincing browsers to prioritize anti-tracking. This statement by Apple (inspired by a similar anti-tracking policy for Firefox introduced by Mozilla earlier in the year) sends a strong message to trackers: we have zero tolerance for attempts to extract user information without their consent. We applaud Apple for taking this strong stance for user privacy.
Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP)
Even before ITP, Apple had been blocking 3rd party cookies and using cache partitioning to mitigate the effects of 3rd party resource cache-based tracking. ITP uses a number of novel techniques to stymie the efforts of trackers even further. For example, it expires cookies when users haven't interacted with a website for 30 days. It uses the Storage Access API which requires meaningful interaction between a user and third-party services before the service is allowed to access its first-party cookies. This means that a 3rd-party service (or a tracker) won't be able to access a stateful, cross-site, persistent identifier in the form of a cookie that they've stored on your browser unless you've actually, say, clicked on that 'like' button. And without that identifier, they'll have a hard time linking your visit to `site-with-a-like-button.com` to your Facebook account. ITP most recently also expires cookies that have been set via link decoration. All this amounts to an impressive and powerful set of tracking protections for Safari users.
Https Everywhere Safari 2017 Interior
Striking a Balance with Developers
Apple's careful roll-out of these technologies has tried to protect users while ensuring that well-meaning web developers aren't caught in the cross-fire. This is a tricky balance to strike: many of the web technologies that enable trackers are also used by non-tracking developers to power the feature-rich web. Outright disabling of a technology such as WebRTC may limit the effectiveness of fingerprinting, but it also disables innovative services such as Google Hangouts, Jitsi Meet and WebTorrent. WebRTC is just one example - the web is replete with technologies that are being used by both good and bad actors. For this reason, it's extraordinarily difficult to remove or limit technologies that enable tracking without causing anger among developers when an application that doesn't track users stops working. Apple has taken a measured approach, introducing technologies and iteratively addressing developers' concerns.
Diving Deep: Some Points of Interest in the Policy
In addition to defining exactly what Apple means by the term 'tracking,' the new policy also enumerates different forms of tracking, including the use of tracking cookies, fingerprinting, HSTS supercookies, and several other examples. The inclusion of HSTS as a tracking technology is significant. HSTS, or HTTP Strict Transport Security, is a web header that sites can use to indicate that they should only be accessed over the secure HTTPS transport layer in the future. Your browser will cache this response and ensure that future requests are not made over insecure HTTP. However, trackers can use this cache to piece together a supercookie that can identify your browser across multiple websites. Safari limits this by only respecting HSTS under certain conditions. For this reason, researchers have lately been suggesting the use of EFF's own HTTPS Everywhere, which maintains a list of HTTPS-supporting sites, as an alternative to caching HSTS headers.
Another interesting part of the policy reads:
Https Everywhere Safari 2017 Price
If a party attempts to circumvent our tracking prevention methods, we may add additional restrictions without prior notice. These restrictions may apply universally; to algorithmically classified targets; or to specific parties engaging in circumvention.
Apple is reserving itself a great amount of latitude in this clause. We can speculate that this will cause companies which have a business model partially based on tracking to reconsider their practices, for fear of being blocked by Safari users universally. This may cause companies to self-police the shadier side of their revenue stream, if they value the visits of Safari users.
The policy ends with the clause
We want to see a healthy web ecosystem, with privacy by design.
Get cod net. We couldn't agree more. We sincerely hope more browsers, such as Google's Chrome, adopt the tenet of 'privacy by design' as well. Mcc waco phone number.
