Dear mozilla friends,
There is a banner link at the top of addons.mozilla.org that is titled ‘Top anti-tracking extensions: see staff picks’.
This is a crucial resource for many and I can attest to its importance first-hand. The ‘staff picks’ was where I first went after I downloaded Firefox in the midst of a ongoing malware infection, reeling from identity theft and it was there that I first hoped I could fight back after reading the description for “'ublock origin”, a tool that has stood the test of time.
So I must report that the current iteration contains an inaccuracy in the top spot which could give false hope and bad information to someone else whose experiences a similar situation to mine.
The first staff pick, Privacy Badger is a solid extension and many would benefit from it but writing that, “Privacy Badger actually gets better at tracker blocking the more you use it. As you naturally navigate around the web and encounter new types of hidden trackers, Privacy Badger will find and block them—unreliant on externally maintained block lists or other methods that may lag behind the latest trends in sneaky tracking.” Is inaccurate and misrepresents the functionality of the add-on and its capabilities. That feature was removed in 2020 when Google security warned it could actually be used as a tracking vector.
As the EFF blog post explained it, ‘since Privacy Badger adapts its behavior based on the way that sites you visit behave, a dedicated attacker could manipulate the way Privacy Badger acts: what it blocks and what it allows. In theory, this can be used to identify users (a form of fingerprinting) or to extract some kinds of information from the pages they visit.’ And since that time, privacy badger has been reliant "solely on its “Badger Sett” pre-trained list of tracking domains to perform blocking by default. "
I hate to be pedantic but the current review goes against a lot of known privacy meausres since these attacks against heuristics-based methods also affected apple safari’s ITP and helped give traction to the common thought that by blending in and making every browser look the same, as TOR browser tries to accomplish, maybe they couldn’t find us and track us as much. More importantly, Firefox’s privacy.resistfingerprinting settings are based off of this idea and so it seems especially wrong to allow the current review for the number one staff pick to remain as it is currently written.
Thank you for your time and thank you to the people at Mozilla for making such a great browser.
Your privacy friend,
Muhammad Zillah
But all my friends call me “Moe”