this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Hmm, I agree with you 100%, but power of defaults is how big companies get average consumers. Maybe Firefox should make it default with a setting to turn it on?
A setting titled "allow copying of tracking data", a lot of people won't allow.
Fight fire with fire.
This just:
Encourages companies to try to work around it
More importantly, possibly breaks important functionality
It's like saying GDPR encourages companies to try work around data protection, so it should not be implemented.
It's not like that at all.
Links support parameters for a reason, and I promise you that the main reason isn't tracking. They can convey important info like the language, search parameters, a specific comment, etc.
Removing them willy-nilly by default is going to cause issue sooner or later, and then people are going to blame Firefox for "not working" and are just gonna switch to Chrome because "it just works".
That's not what we want is it?
As I understand now it removes only limited set of query strings
Yeah but the list is hardcoded. Collisions can happen.
Also, since it's hardcoded, it's easily gameable, and it will be gamed if too many people start filtering them out.
It's a good start but a bad solution overall
"utm_" collisions?
The trackers can be renamed to anything that's regularly used in other places.
Pushing to make this a default will only harm the small minority that might be enjoying the benefits right now.
At least with the current way it's set up.