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Cookieblock all not-yet-blocked trackers (change below-threshold/most permissive state from "green" to "yellow")

Open paoletto opened this issue 7 years ago • 8 comments

I personally find odd that this request hasn't been implemented yet (= someone pushing not to). Anyway, I request, again, to be allowed to chose what is the most permissive mode i want privacy badger to use automatically. E.g., if i set it to yellow, privacy badger should be only allowed to automatically set a tracker to yellow or red. If i want a specific tracker to be green, i can do it manually.

I think it's not a big deal to add this feature, so i hope to see it in relatively soon. Thank you.

paoletto avatar Jul 18 '17 15:07 paoletto

Duplicate of #1011.

ghostwords avatar Jul 18 '17 15:07 ghostwords

@paoletto to elaborate a little on why this is hard, Privacy Badger uses a heuristic to determine if something is a tracker. Sometimes this heuristic is incorrect, so we require that the tracker trigger the heuristic 3 times before marking it red or yellow. If we blocked all "potential trackers" we would probably block many sites incorrectly.

cowlicks avatar Jul 19 '17 19:07 cowlicks

The point of my request is that sometimes the users (like me) are ok with only allowing 2 states for the heuristic: yellow and red. Meaning that by default nothing is green. If a site is rendered incorrectly, well, that's quite easy to detect, and to slide the tracker setting to green. By the way, i have never seen a site rendered incorrectly with everything set to yellow. Sometimes, instead, it happens when trackers go to red. In general allowing me to remove green, and leaving it only as a manual option can be handy for some. I remember this having been asked in the past too.

paoletto avatar Jul 28 '17 09:07 paoletto

Reopening as per https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadger/issues/1011#issuecomment-337688263. We should investigate at some point to see how much extra breakage this would cause if we were to do this for all Privacy Badger users. I don't think it makes sense to implement this as an optional feature, however.

ghostwords avatar Oct 18 '17 18:10 ghostwords

Can someone provide some hints on where to touch to implement this feature? I might give it a shot, as nobody else seems to have time for it

paoletto avatar Feb 02 '18 13:02 paoletto

Sure, you could start by changing the default action for detected third-party tracking domains. Then you'd want to look for all the places we check constants.ALLOW and possibly update them now that it won't be the default any more (for example, should update the short-circuit check that, if not updated, would prevent domains from getting recorded again so that they may eventually get blocked).

ghostwords avatar Feb 02 '18 19:02 ghostwords

@ghostwords thanks, i will try to do that. By the way, i was thinkering a bit with PB settings: do i understand correctly that if i would want to cookieblock everything, i could simply download the user data, massage it appropriately (e.g., change heuristicAction and userAction to cookieblock), then reload it? by the way i have dnt: false everywhere. does it change anything if i set do not track to true on those records?

paoletto avatar Feb 10 '18 19:02 paoletto

You'd probably want to update userAction properties only, which is what gets updated when you adjust sliders in the UI. (The dnt property is set when the domain declared itself to be DNT-compliant.)

ghostwords avatar Feb 12 '18 15:02 ghostwords