UBlock Origin Firefox add-on supports First-Party Tracker blocking

With the popularity of ad-blocking software, more and more users are beginning to use ad-blocking software to block various ads, and this move is also attracting browser developers.

At present, many browsers have natively supported the ad-blocking function without the user’s active operation. To this end, ad networks are also researching new strategies to cope with universal blocking.

The latest discovered response strategy is that ad networks and websites cooperate to launch first-party trackers, which are not blocked by blocking software by default.

At present, the third-party tracker is commonly used in the online advertising industry, that is, the ad network provides the tracker and then deploys it to website pages for webmasters.

For users, the website that they actively visit is the first-party website, and other content loaded on the website that is not owned by the website is called third-party content.

Therefore, the ad network tracker deployed on the website is also called a third-party tracker, and this tracker is blocked by mainstream ad-blocking software by default.

At the same time, by default, the ad-blocking software will not filter the trackers of the first party website to prevent loading abnormalities caused by blocking these trackers or scripts.

In order to solve the blocking problem, first-party trackers are currently used in some European advertising networks. The operation strategy of this tracker is to use the first-party website domain name.

The first-party website configures the sub-domain name to point to the server provided by the advertising network through DNS so that the request initiated by the user when accessing is still the first-party website domain name.

By default, ad blocking software does not block first-party domain names, but in fact, these first-party domain names point to third-party ad networks for tracking.

At present, all mainstream adblocking software and browser-provided blocking solutions do not support this type of blocking, so the ad network is winning from an adversary perspective.

At the end of last year, a user discovered the first-party tracker, and then the user reported the situation to the well-known ad blocker software uBlock Origin for support.

After receiving user feedback, the project team began targeted research. Eventually, the development team found that the Firefox browser provided relevant interfaces to filter such network requests.

Firefox natively provides an interface to complete filtering while protecting user privacy. Third-party extensions do not need to take over all user requests.

So on Firefox, uBlock Origin has released a new version that can block the first party tracker, but it seems that this feature can only be used on Firefox.

Chromium kernel browsers such as Google Chrome do not provide such interfaces and therefore cannot be used. Interested users can download Firefox and try it out.

Via: techdows