.. title: An Increasingly User-Hostile Web .. slug: increasingly-user-hostile-web .. date: 2017-11-19 14:20:16 UTC+01:00 .. updated: 2018-01-14 .. tags: web, link, firefox, privacy, google+ .. link: .. description: .. type: text This post is the first in a series linking to interesting articles or papers. The bare links will be paired with some background on why I think they are relevant for someone else also. The installments of the series will be easily discernible by the "Too Many Books To Read" `xkcd comic `_. The idea for such a series materialized after reading `Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web `_ that I noticed on the `Hacker News `_ newsletter. .. image:: /images/books_toomany.png :alt: Too Many Books To Read :align: center .. TEASER_END Although most of the content of the article wasn't really news to me, I found the focus and historical context of the article to be very well suited to ponder the state of the web today. Admittedly I never had a Facebook account as the "walled garden" aspect of such a service contradicted the decentralized web that I witnessed first hand during the 1990s and which kept me away from it right from the start. Also the way how Facebook sells private information of "clients" for a lot of money to third-parties made signing up a no-go right from the start. In this case certainly the saying that "if you are not paying for a service then you are the product" is spot on, but maybe that's a topic for another post. I did however use `Google+ `_ for a while to find out what such a platform is capable of and if I can benefit from it. Being in possession of an Android mobile phone, the account was already there and thus the barrier to using it was very low. During `three years of using Google+ `_ I found the possibility to publish content limited in size to be very attractive. Compared to the effort of maintaining a web site typing in something into the web-browser to be immediately published was much easier and thus used also for smaller things. Still the feedback that was also readily available in contrast to a web site of 90s style showed that there was _some_ interest even for those small pieces. Google+ became unbearable end of 2016 as I got more and more "suggestions" of openly xenophobic content. At the beginning I tried countering this by reporting what I considered to be offensive postings, but in the end I simply gave up on it altogether. The fact that I could not control my own content nor easily transfer it to a different platform added to my dissatisfaction and finally resulted in starting this blog under my own full control. Back to the article, I found the analysis of a renowned news site on the internet astonishing in its detail. With the help of the `webbkoll web privacy check tool `_ the author shows that visiting a single news page initiated 430 third-party requests that were handled by parties not authorized by the person reading the content. These connections are not even easily visible to the user. I was prepared for a handful of such requests or maybe a couple dozen, but 430 was beyond my imagination. As the tool is readily usable on the internet, I quickly ran a check on `Heise `_ which I visit quite regularly. The analysis shows that it also initiated 369 third-party requests to a whopping 56 third-party entities. This result made me think a lot and ponder the current situation somewhat further. In contrast to the web checker tool, I do visit www.heise.de with the Firefox Browser and the `Adblock Plus `_ extension installed to block the advertisements. As I do not want to read intrusive adverts and as it has a significant influence on the page load speed, installing this Add-on was usually the first thing after installing Firefox on my or any other machine. I will be discussing the advertisement business model some pages are based on nowadays separately in a later post. For now I now wondered if Adblock Plus also blocks those third-party requests possibly conveying much more information than needed for the sake of presenting advertisements to me. Together with third-party cookies those connections can indeed communicate all of the browsing meta-data to entities that I do not know, nor want to collect personal data from me. Now if you belong to the large group of persons who believe that meta-data is not such a big deal, a presentation that I ran across recently may lead you to reconsider. The blog `SpiegelMining `_ shows what modern data analysis can read out of pure meta-data. If you are interested, then the nice `video of a talk `_ given by David Kriesel at 33c3 (German only) gives a nice introduction to the topic and is absolutely worth watching. In this light I tried to find out in more detail what Adblock Plus is doing and quickly ran across the `uBlock Origin Firefox Add-On `_. As the `homepage `_ explains, uBlock Origin "is a wide-spectrum blocker that happens to be able to function as a mere ad blocker". Coupled with the better efficiency this chimed so well with my research that it was a straightforward process to switch all my Firefox installations over to uBlock Origin. Finally checking `this blog with webbkoll `_ reminded me that I am also not 100% clean with respect to the privacy of my visitors. Using `Disqus `_ for the comments indeed has the potential to transmit meta-data. Also only by the help of webbkoll I realized that the selected theme for Nikola requests a font every time the page is visited. In conjunction with the "HTTP referrer" header this can also potentially be used for tracking purposes. For now, I will simply acknowledge this, but maybe this can be changed in the future. Let's see. Update 2018-01-14: Moving the Piwik (now called Matomo) analytics to a sibling domain cleared the false positive previously reported by webbkoll on the blog, so the last paragraph was adapted to that change.