Propagation: defeating journal trackers and other web-bugs with FireFox

[denny]

Reposted from ciphergoth's journal:

This journal entry describes ways in which people you know may be monitoring the way you use LJ. How often you read their journal, what friends groups you define, and so on.

It's done with what are called "web bugs" - tiny images served from special servers that record this information. You can block the servers that serve the web bugs, but they can always create more servers, so it's a game of "whack-a-mole".

Today I found out about a setting in Firefox that blocks *all* such tracking, from all websites to all websites, permanently. No longer will people be able to monitor you in this way.

Go to the URL bar and type "about:config". Select the setting "network.http.sendRefererHeader". If it has the value "2", change it to "1". That's it.

Technical details

I'll be setting this on all my browsers ASAP.

I'm actually not particularly bothered by the LJ web-bugs - they strike me as slightly inane, but I don't mind if people know when I read their journal. I will be changing this setting though, to defeat any commercially-motivated web-bugs that might be hooked into web advertising and similar.

Comments

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

If people are protecting their images by checking for a matching referrer, it will stop their images loading even when you're on their site... apparently Keenspace comics is one place that does so, I guess it's not unlikely for some fetish sites to do the same.