Worries: privacy, tracking, security
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I'm using Vivaldi from the very beginning, three years ago, despite my worries about being too tight to Google, as I posted here some time ago.
All seems to be fine, but some stubborn cookies (from facebook.com) could not be be deleted and I became worried.But, after last Vivaldi upgrades to new Chromium (I'm using 1.12.955.20 64-bit now), I'm pretty sure something is wrong.
I visited a store (not logged on) and added one product to basket. Then I deleted all cookies and exited Vivaldi. Next day I logged to Facebook only to see an advertisement for same product at same store I visited a day ago.
Same thing happened later with another site I entered (a software developer) which was advertised on my Facebook page on next session.I did all above again with Firefox and such things not happened.
Some more test needs to be made to check if Blink is using user’s data on behalf of google & friends and if Google is charging customers for nothing.
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1 I approach neither Facebook nor to 20 km
2 use Adblock Genesis
3 also Script Blocker for Chrome
5 I use ixquik as search engineThis way only I have cookies of pages that I visit regularly, no other
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@Gwen-Dragon
I disabled 3'rd party cookies and I am using both uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. More, I usually clear all cookies (<SHIFT/CTRL/DEL>) when I leave a website. I'm deleting cookies then exit and start Vivaldi again every time I'm using Facebook (last version of Vivaldi/Chromium still shows cookies after deleting them until you restart the browser).I noticed nothing similar with early versions of Chromium (except Facebook cookies which cannot be deleted sometimes), so I'm pretty sure it's Blink.
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@catweazle
I did all, (I had do use Facebook once or twice a week, only with pc browser), I'm using duckduckgo.com and startpage.com only.I'm pretty sure all are new(?) features in Blink engine.
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@hadden89
Thanks, but these are first things I do when I'm starting using a browser. -
@stilgarwolf tracking is not only done via cookies or hardwired connections of the famous GAFA. There are a number of techniques used. The most impressive to me is evercookie:
https://samy.pl/evercookie/
I tried it and I had to de-install the browser and all local (config) files from the browser to get rid of it. And still it would recognise me via fingerprinting.
For a full assessment of current risks see
https://strews.ercim.eu/images/STREWS-D3.2-roadmap.pdf (big PDF)
You're probably victim of a facebook cross-site scripting. AFAIK, firefox has an elaborate number of things they are blocking. Create a new user on your system, remove the "shield" in firefox while on Facebook, it should do the same. Try and remove that user again.And yes, Blink is the Google engine and thus has limited protections against tracking. The philosophy behind is to know the user to better serve (and target for ads). Firefox has a lot more protections built in. Still much less than Opera 12. But the Vivaldi team will at some point arrive at their limits on what they can protect without forking the Blink engine. The more they will wrap protections around and if Vivaldi gets a visible market share, the more the trackers (and Google is one of them) will move the offensive code into the core of the rendering engine to protect against them.
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@rigo said in Worries: privacy, tracking, security:
And yes, Blink is the Google engine and thus has limited protections against tracking. The philosophy behind is to know the user to better serve (and target for ads). Firefox has a lot more protections built in. Still much less than Opera 12. But the Vivaldi team will at some point arrive at their limits on what they can protect without forking the Blink engine. The more they will wrap protections around and if Vivaldi gets a visible market share, the more the trackers (and Google is one of them) will move the offensive code into the core of the rendering engine to protect against them.
That's why I posted. And because I'd prefer using Vivaldi when browsing sensitive data.
Now I must switch back to Firefox.Forking Blink is not a solution due to the need to audit the untrusted code, but I'd consider KHTML (or WebKit) team to work with.
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@gwen-dragon said in Worries: privacy, tracking, security:
@stilgarwolf said in Worries: privacy, tracking, security:
last version of Vivaldi/Chromium still shows cookies after deleting them until you restart the browser
Which Vivaldi on which OS? How can you proof this? Where do you inspect the deleted cookies?
Vivaldi 1.12.955.20 64-bit, Windows 7
chrome://settings/content/cookies; try "remove all" then refresh page.
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@stilgarwolf BTW, I also get strange behavior. When using qwant.com, it says "Host error, please try later". Maybe there is a new tracking roll out happening right now. Because I have set my hosts file to resolve FB to 127.0.0.1 The page can not load things from FB. But I have no time now to start the wireshark. But this is not necessarily the fault of Vivaldi as I have the same with firefox