[IP] <a ping> tracking what links you click on
Begin forwarded message:
From: Don Drake <don@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: January 18, 2006 10:49:07 AM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: <a ping> tracking what links you click on
Dave,
I found this via Slashdot, a new attribute to anchor tags that is
being implemented in the next version of Firefox (1.6a) that makes it
easier than ever to track what links you’re clicking.
-Don
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/darin/archives/009594.html
I've been meaning to blog about a new web platform feature that we've
added to trunk builds of Firefox. It is now possible to define a ping
attribute on anchor and area tags. When a user follows a link via one
of these tags, the browser will send notification pings to the
specified URLs after following the link.
I'm sure this may raise some eye-brows among privacy conscious folks,
but please know that this change is being considered with the utmost
regard for user privacy. The point of this feature is to enable link
tracking mechanisms commonly employed on the web to get out of the
critical path and thereby reduce the time required for users to see
the page they clicked on. Many websites will employ redirects to have
all link clicks on their site first go back to them so they can know
what you are doing and then redirect your browser to the site you
thought you were going to. The net result is that you end up waiting
for the redirect to occur before your browser even begins to load the
site that you want to go to. This can have a significant impact on
page load performance.
Websites even employ "onmousedown" event handlers that change the
href attribute at the very last second before a click occurs. This
makes it so that hovering over the link displays the location that
you want to go to, but it still ends up taking you someplace else.
This change is being considered in large part because some very
popular websites have asked for a solution to this problem. The
feature itself was designed and specified by the WhatWG.
Donald Drake
President
Drake Consulting
http://www.drakeconsult.com/
312-560-1574
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