1409809 - Constantly remind people about privacy.resistFingerprinting

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Security, enhancement)

Description

[Tom S [:evilpie]]

People who set privacy.resistFingerprinting without any idea what it does are going to be a constant debugging nightmare. We already had people report JavaScript bugs about the 100ms time clamping. You see people on reddit all the time complaining about AMO not working etc. Can we have some kind of reminder about this somewhere?

Comment 1

[Arjen de Jager]

Something similar to the Accessibility Services indicator? Which shows up in the tab bar on the right (LTR) when accessibility.force_disabled is set to 0 and a third party application is accessing the browser through Accessibility Services.

Comment 2

[Tom Ritter [:tjr] (OOTO until 4/30 at least)]

The Accessibility Services indicator looks like this: https://s20.postimg.org/57ycxmsil/fx_accessibility.png (It's the little person in the top right.)

Comment 3

[Tom Ritter [:tjr] (OOTO until 4/30 at least)]

The Accessibility Services indicator mentioned in Comment 1 looks like this: https://imgur.com/72JOC3h (It's the little person with the arms outstretched in the blue circle in the upper right)

Comment 4

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

I'm not a big fan of adding more indicators to the tab bar, to be honest. It sets a precedent for even more indicators and that can quickly become a usability problem.

I'd suggest the site identity block (where the Tracking Protection icon lives), but resistFingerprinting is not really a site-specific setting, so I'm not sure if it really fits well there. We _could_ spin a nice UX story around it if there was a way to disable resistFingerprinting on a site-specific level, though I don't think there is, right?

Comment 5

[Tom Ritter [:tjr] (OOTO until 4/30 at least)]

(In reply to Johann Hofmann [:johannh] from comment #4)
> I'm not a big fan of adding more indicators to the tab bar, to be honest. It
> sets a precedent for even more indicators and that can quickly become a
> usability problem.
> 
> I'd suggest the site identity block (where the Tracking Protection icon
> lives), but resistFingerprinting is not really a site-specific setting, so
> I'm not sure if it really fits well there. We _could_ spin a nice UX story
> around it if there was a way to disable resistFingerprinting on a
> site-specific level, though I don't think there is, right?

There is not right now, but we're discussing it and seeing where it falls in terms of priority amoung the different antifingerprinting usability improvements.

Comment 6

[Tom Ritter [:tjr] (OOTO until 4/30 at least)]

Right now our plan for improving usability is focused on enabling Resist Fingerprinting only in Private Browsing and significantly improving the UX of the Canvas Prompt. Other things we are considering are enabling users to disable it on a per-origin situation. But we don't intend to add an indicator like this bug suggests.

Comment 7

[Tom S [:evilpie]]

:/ Really unfortunate, considering how many people enable this. Maybe we could warn about in a few more places like addons.mozilla.org.