Ancestors

Written by Pomax on 2025-01-14 at 15:20

It'd be cool if browsers didn't come with all this "to prevent finger printing we've made it impossible to do things with precision" bullshit. Here's an idea: instead, you make adblocking, script blocking, and third party domain blocking just part of "this is what a browser is supposed to let you control out of the box".

It's almost like someone should make a new browser based on you owning your browsing experience, not funded or owned by people who benefit from sabotaging your experience.

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Written by Kartik Agaram on 2025-01-15 at 17:16

@TheRealPomax I think there is a hard problem here even if the browser provider was perfectly aligned with the computer owner. You're still using this program to access an eco-system of variable hostility. Website A serves an image just so you can see it, website B serves a tracking pixel. In the face of this even something as aligned as Gemini just gave up on images altogether "to protect your privacy".

The hard choice: speak out or hide when anyone might hear you in the dark forest.

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Written by Pomax on 2025-01-15 at 17:49

@akkartik absolutely. But the nice thing about problems that exist either way is that they don't matter: those are inherent problems that don't contribute to or detract from how we decide to move forward.

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Toot

Written by Kartik Agaram on 2025-01-15 at 20:08

@TheRealPomax I don't quite follow. In this example of images, what does your line of reasoning recommend? Do you want to be able to load images (do things with precision) no matter the privacy cost? Or do you want to follow Gemini and never load images automatically? Or some third choice?

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Descendants

Written by Kartik Agaram on 2025-01-15 at 20:10

@TheRealPomax Oh, you want more fine-grained control over images? Maybe a page shows shadows and you can click on each to load inline? Or policies for specific websites that are allowed to implicitly load?

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Written by Pomax on 2025-01-15 at 21:03

@akkartik step back: what is the privacy cost? Is it big enough to need laws? Good news, we have those. First party profiling and tracking is already covered, and third party blocking (and yes, that would including not loading a hot-linked image by default, let's get back to seeing broken image links on pages, that was a powerful signal on the old web) should be a given.

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