Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Better handle requests in activated widgets #2662

Open
ghostwords opened this issue Aug 6, 2020 · 0 comments
Open

Better handle requests in activated widgets #2662

ghostwords opened this issue Aug 6, 2020 · 0 comments
Labels
enhancement widgets Click-to-activate placeholders for blocked but potentially useful social buttons/widgets

Comments

@ghostwords
Copy link
Member

When you activate a widget (click "allow once" or "always allow on this site" (#2653) in our placeholder), we currently not only temporarily allow requests with domains specified in the widget JSON's unblockDomains array, but also requests that originate from frames whose domains are specified in unblockDomains. Furthermore, when we temporarily allow domains, we don't report them in the popup.

While this seems to restore full functionality to activated widgets, it comes with excessive loss of privacy to advertising/tracking domains, and complete lack of visibility/control over these widget-spawned domains in Privacy Badger's UI.

One idea would be to stop allowing requests based on their frame, and instead expand unblockDomains lists to fully cover all required widget domains. This will improve privacy at the expense of maintenance/potential widget breakage.

It's less clear what to do about visibility/control. Temporarily allowed domains are neither tracking-but-haven't-yet-seen-enough-to-decide-to-block nor not-yet-seen-to-track. I think this ties into a specialized UI for widget replacement in the popup (a UI to help in cases when we block a widget but aren't able to properly replace it for whatever reason). So, solving this could be a two step process, where we first tackle privacy and then reporting.

This issue gains importance as we continue to expand the use of widget replacement.

@ghostwords ghostwords added enhancement widgets Click-to-activate placeholders for blocked but potentially useful social buttons/widgets labels Aug 6, 2020
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
enhancement widgets Click-to-activate placeholders for blocked but potentially useful social buttons/widgets
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant