We have also participated in meetings and discussions on tracking protection and lobbied browser developers about it.
The Panopticlick research shows that it's potentially difficult to impossible to detect and prevent persistent cross-site tracking in the current web platform by technical means. Even if we fixed every cookie-like mechanism so that no site can set and query state except through official HTTP cookies and subject to the user's cookie preferences, the sites might still be able to recognize the browsers by querying other navigator (and OS and plugin) properties. Tor Browser has been able to do a great job on that issue -- but at the cost of disabling a lot of web platform features that sites might expect.
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
We have also participated in meetings and discussions on tracking protection and lobbied browser developers about it.
The Panopticlick research shows that it's potentially difficult to impossible to detect and prevent persistent cross-site tracking in the current web platform by technical means. Even if we fixed every cookie-like mechanism so that no site can set and query state except through official HTTP cookies and subject to the user's cookie preferences, the sites might still be able to recognize the browsers by querying other navigator (and OS and plugin) properties. Tor Browser has been able to do a great job on that issue -- but at the cost of disabling a lot of web platform features that sites might expect.