topic Re: Going backwards? in Industry News

Going backwards?

rslade — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 16:38:04 GMT

Chrome, Safari, and Opera have had a setting to disable the hyperlink auditing ping, which is a way for advertisers to track you and your activity, and, particularly, your response to advertising. (Firefox has set this off by default for some time.)

Now, for some reason, Chrome, Safari, and Opera are removing the ability to disable this tracking feature. There are, of course, other ways to track you, but you are losing a bit more privacy ...

Re: Going backwards?

Beads — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 17:23:19 GMT

Or are we seeing the educated "web consumer", so to say, taking control of their browser history and demanding the ability not to be tracked?

I think people are getting wise to all the "free" that the Internet brings, strings attached of course.

- b/eads

Re: Going backwards?

Shannon — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 13:18:54 GMT

@rslade wrote:
Now, for some reason, Chrome, Safari, and Opera are removing the ability to disable this tracking feature.

The setting is still present in my Chrome browser, but I saw at least one post about it being removed from the beta versions, on Google's Support forum.

There are, of course, other ways to track you, but you are losing a bit more privacy ...

Frankly, I doubt many users are even aware of the setting --- let alone using it --- and I don't suppose it's going to be much of a concern to the majority, who won't think much of privacy while all their attention is on whatever they enjoy on the browsers...