On: DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard in San Francisco)

[lysium]

RefControl https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

I'm using it since years and I don't understand all that referrer-privacy hype. Just don't send the referrer.

[mike-cardwell → lysium]

I recently started using RefControl to get around the nytimes.com block which comes up if the referer isn't google.

For privacy reasons, I set it so it forges the referrer to be the root of the destination site if the domain is different too. So when I go to google.com and click on http://www.example.com/foo, the referer it sends is http://www.example.com/ instead of http://www.google.com/searchterm.

I haven't found any sites which this breaks yet...

[T-hawk → mike-cardwell]

You do realize this breaks the ability of www.example.com to track its traffic? They have now lost the information as to how their search rank is performing on Google, and have acquired incorrect information that they think you typed in www.example.com directly.

You're entirely within legal rights to do this, of course. But if everyone did, then sites would have no idea where their traffic is coming from. Morally it is a bit questionable: your browser is blatantly and directly lying to www.example.com about how you got there.

[mike-cardwell → T-hawk]

You think a website has a right to track where I came from. I think a user has a right to privacy.