![]() The news lead to headlines like “ Google's Manifest V3 changes will soon disable uBlock Origin on Chrome” and “ Google to Force-Block Ad Blockers - Time to Get Firefox?” This is a pretty technical topic that can get confusing, and using rage bait in headlines has led to a lot of people thinking uBlock Origin and other ad blockers will be completely removed from Chrome, which is not the case. Google just announced that the transition to Manifest V3 is back on the calendar, and extensions not updated to the new platform will start to be turned off as early as June 2024. Most of the focus has been on the uBlock Origin extension, as developer Raymond Hill stated back in 2019 that the changes “would be the death of uBO and uMatrix.” ![]() The update has been controversial, with some changes negatively affecting content blocking extensions (ad blockers). Google has been working on a new platform for Chrome extensions over the past few years, called Manifest V3. Google's alternative proposal, part of its "Privacy Sandbox" initiative, calls for an identifier field capable of storing 64 bits of data – considerably more than the integer 64.Īs the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, this enables a range of numbers up to 18 quintillion, allowing advertisers to create unique IDs for every ad impression they serve, information that could then be associated with individual users.11 min read Credit: Microsoft Designer / DALL-E 3 Hill, uBO's creator, recently confirmed to The Register that's still the case.Įven if Chrome were to implement a DNS resolution API, Google has made it clear it wants to maintain the ability to track people on the web and place cookies, for the sake of its ad business.Īpple's answer to marketer angst over being denied analytic data by Safari has been to propose a privacy-preserving ad click attribution scheme that allows 64 different ad campaign identifiers – so marketers can see which worked. "uBO is now equipped to deal with third-party disguised as first-party as far as Firefox's browser.dns allows it," Hill wrote, adding that he assumes this can't be fixed in Chrome at the moment because Chrome doesn't have an equivalent DNS resolution API.Īeris said, "For Chrome, there is no DNS API available, and so no easy way to detect this," adding that Chrome under Manifest v3, a pending revision of Google's extension platform, will break uBO. Firefox supports an API to resolve the hostname of a DNS record, which can unmask CNAME shenanigans, thereby allowing developers to craft blocking behavior accordingly. Two days ago, uBlock Origin developer Raymond Hill deployed a fix for Firefox users in uBlock Origin v1.24.1b0. The technique is also discussed in a 2010 academic research paper, "Cookie Blocking and Privacy: First Parties Remain a Risk," by German Gomez, Julian Yalaju, Mario Garcia, and Chris Hoofnagle. ![]() Using DNS records to make a third-party domain appear to be first-party was documented previously in a 2014 paper by Lukasz Olejnik and Claude Castelluccia, researchers with Inria, a French research institute. Mozilla says Firefox won't defang ad blockers – unlike a certain ad-giant browser READ MORE ![]() Aeris added that DNS delegation clearly violates Europe's GDPR, which "clearly states that 'user-centric tracking' requires consent, especially in the case of a third-party service usage."Ī recent statement from the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Germany notes that Google Analytics and similar services can only be used with consent. In a conversation with The Register, Aeris said Criteo, an ad retargeting biz, appears to have deployed the technique to their customers recently, which suggests it will become more pervasive. As Eulerian explains on its website, "The collection taking place under the name of the advertiser, and not under a third party, neither the ad blockers nor the browsers, interrupt the calls of tags." But wait, there's moreĪnother marketing analytics biz, Wizaly, also advocates this technique to bypass Apple's ITP 2.2 privacy protections.Īs does Adobe, which explains on its website that one of the advantages of CNAME records for data collection is they " you to track visitors between a main landing domain and other domains in browsers that do not accept third-party cookies." ![]()
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