this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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Yeah. I thought about that. When you add an icon to your rows of shortcuts in Firefox and it fails to fetch the correct icon and gives it a generic letter instead and you want to add an icon yourself you cannot just upload or insert an icon to your Firefox, you will need to point it to some web link where the remote icon is. I can imagine Firefox wants to check at each startup whether the remote icon has changed or not (Not completely unreasonable. Think about Twitter changing to X).
Come on, who are we kidding. 😄 It's done for pings. The privacy implication is so in-your-face there's no way they missed it. 🙂
Favicons are from 99. The technology and handling of them wasn’t developed to invade your privacy.
We're talking about images on your homepage, which phone home every time you open the browser, and even each time you open a new tab.
You can't possibly believe that an organization that has been making a browser for a living for decades missed the implications of that.
on my firefox those are all favicons. when you say that "they" phone home, what's happening is that the browser is requesting the favicon for the sponsored links so it shows the right mini logo above the name of the website. if you want to disable this behavior, you can simply disable sponsored links with the gear menu in the top right corner.
if you want to disable all favicons, disable browser.chrome.favicons (old?) and/or browser.chrome.site_icons and browser.shell.shortcutFavicons in about:config, clear your cache and restart.
i'm pretty sure that firefox pulls favicons from cache for favorites or recents or whatever, but i haven't checked.
The OP has clearly said that the problem was not with the sponsored links, but with the links they added themselves. Also, with your response to disable favicons you dismiss the problem itself. The problem is that there are favicons, the problem is that they are reloaded/rechecked every single time unnecessarily. The solution would be for firefox to cache these icons if it doesn't do that already, to use this cache for loading the icons, and to heavily limit how often these icons are refreshed, with an option to never refresh them and maybe only refresh a single icon when refresh is pressed for it.
It would also be perfectly fine if refreshing it only happened on the next time the page is visited.
Sorry but your response reads like "your issue is silly, but if you really don't like how it works you can disable it in its entirety"
That’s not a well thought out solution.
The problem you’re describing is that the sponsored links get resolved every time the new tab page is opened (ostensibly).
There’s a couple of ways this could be a problem: the most obvious way is if you the user use favicons to determine what underlying software is actually providing a service. Last time I used it it was called favicon hashing because you wouldn’t even physically look at the icon itself, just compare its hash to a list of other hashes to immediately know the attack surface you were looking at.
But that’s tangential and not really related to the new tab page.
The other way it’s a problem is for users, applies to cached favicons and was reported in 2021, websites would compare their locally cached favicons and know that you’d visited before or if you had been logged in before and bunch of other information. It was a big deal because even the then relatively new privacy badger couldn’t stop it. The “fix” was just to resolve favicons as needed every time instead of caching. The impact was minimal, they’re just little icons after all, and that’s where we are today!
So the “phone home” behavior was actually a fix for real in the wild privacy exploitation.
If my response came across as seeing the issue as silly (I read it again, and can’t see it, perfect lemmy post!), it’s possible that understanding leaked through. If you’re determined to view it in a negative light, consider though that I took the person at their word that it was a problem instead of explaining that it’s a fix for another problem that was widely reported and provided detailed instructions for how to disrupt that process.
Sorry, I don't understand this point.
The way I understand it is that the user looks for icons of services it knows, but not the exact icon but just something similar. The thing I don't understand is why is this a problem, but probably I misunderstood something.
I see. I think caching could be solved in a way that does not reintroduce that tracking possibility, though.
One approach would be to only have that cache be used by the new tab page. Page visits always update it, but not read it.
Another would be to always use the cache, but never tell the server that we have that icon cached. The former is probably better though.
In hindsight probably I have misread something. Sorry for the tension.
The first example I gave is a Classico way that a person would examine favicons to determine the software serving the website. If I wanted to do this to your website I’d resolve a bunch of your sites pages and look for a favicon that’s the default of like nginx or something then when I find it I know what I’m up against.
There’s not really a way to do caching that defeats the second example. The whole point of caching is to avoid sending a bunch of data back and forth, so even if you don’t let a website touch and grab all over the objects in the cache and instead only treat the page’s content as a manifest then the website will still be able to figure out what favicons corresponding to dates and times you’ve got in there by seeing weather or not the browser asks for them to be sent.
I guess you could just not say anything to the web server, let it send whatever it wants and ignore it, but at that point you’d be better off to do the default behavior of just not caching favicons instead and skip a step.
But the idea is that the website can't tell that, because websites would use a different cache store than the new tab page.
Even if facebook's icon is saved in the new tab page's cache, when a website wants to load that icon it will only try to find it in the normal cache. If it's not there or it is expired, it is requested again, passed to the normal cache store, and the normal cache store can also give that to the cache store if the new tab page.
The new tab page is not from 99, however. And even for generic favicon handling my experience in case if bookmarks is that the bookmark won't have the favicon of the website if it couldn't obtain in in the moment the bookmark was created. So no, it does not seem to be an issue with the favicon system itself, but rather the new tab page.
I’m almost 100% that if sponsored links are enabled then new tab page calls mozilla or whoever to figure out what they are and then resolves the sponsored link pages to pull their favicon.
I’ll verify when I get home and have control over both the computer and the gateway, but it really doesn’t seem malicious or dangerous to me…
Yeah, it really depends on where those requests go to. If they go to mozilla, that's not that much of a problem, because for addon updates and profile sync it is happening anyways. But if they go to the websites themselves, now that is a problem.
It may be easier for you to test it using the browser toolbox. It's diagnostic tools are not limited to a single tab, but it shows everything of the browser.