[tor-talk] ads slow Tor Browser dramatically

[grarpamp]

I can see a siteA or adnet recognizing a unique is visiting them by
watching your ad pulling profile, especially if you customized it.
I can see adnet maybe knowing you're the same user on siteA and siteB.
I can maybe even see siteA knowing you're the same user on siteB if
the sites share intel with adnet.
I can see an exit knowing these things through similar active/passive
means that the adnets might use.

I think these four are all possible right?

In practice guess is that people would be more at risk of tracking
by not being session careful and using ctrl-shift-del-everything [1].

But in any case, I thought the purpose of TBB was to end
torbutton in conjunction with FF ESR releases to have the
resource to make the changes to FF that Mozilla was not willing,
or delays in, doing... and to do it in the one place where they would
seem to natively belong, the browser, rather than torbutton.
And to send those changes back upstream to Mozilla.
I did not get the sense TBB was to do that for addons.

Given that the fingerprinting being covered in this thread
still doesn't give away your real identity unless you chose
to provide it to one of the sites/adnets, back to the original
topic...

People use these plugins because they:
- Hate ads
- On Tor, it is often more than just noticeably faster. Not just
in reducing bandwidth and connections,  but in page rendering
timeouts and incomplete pages when adservers don't respond.
- May even make you less trackable by not ingesting so
many cross-site cookies in the first place.

For many people, those benefits outweigh the talked about risks.
So install them if you like. But I don't think it's right to ask
torproject to install the plugin of the day as a convenience factor.
Or to maintain its own version of a plugin unless its vulnerabilities
are at least as high as its demand, and the upstream won't fix it.

[1] TBB could get rid of the annoying 'OK' prompt in the pop up
for that, thus going back to the old immediate way it took effect
in the past. Some sort of status bar flash when the clearing
completes would be useful. So would doing the clearing async.