23/10/14 11:08, Georg Koppen wrote:
what does adding Adblock plus have for a benefit wrt to tracking avoidance? To put it more precisely: In which cases are the defenses in the current Tor Browser not adequate yet Adblock plus fixes this situation (I could not find anything on the link you gave above about it)?
In all honesty, it's not very clear to me why we state this. We've been shipping AdBlock together with the browser since before there was a TBB, and even before Tails, the Incognito LiveCD did it. I added AdBlock to Incognito's browser primarily for performance reasons, I think.
Any way, we have a ticket about possibly removing AdBlock in Tails:
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/5649
As for tracking avoidance, I guess the basic issue is that if I (more or less) concurrently browse sites X and Y, and both serve ads from Z, then Z can correlate my presence on X and Y in various ways. The Tor Browser does stuff to prevent this, like disabling 3rd party cookies and probably more things I'm unaware of, but I suppose the ad fetches still may use the same Tor circuit, so AdBlock:ing seems to at least help with preventing that. Of course, it uses a blacklist approach, and the real solution is something like Tor bug #3455 [1] I guess.
Do you feel that the above is accurate? If not, please elaborate, so we can progress on Tails ticket #5649.
For me personally, however, the biggest benefit with AdBlock Plus is that I can enjoy my browsing experience as ad-free. This may not be a good argument for its inclusion, though, just a personal anecdote. :)
Cheers!
[1] Tor Browser should set SOCKS username for a request based on first party domain: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3455