1546198 - setting needed for users to alter/control <a ping> hyperlink auditing in order to adhere to spec

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Nick Doty]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open Firefox > Preferences... and check Privacy & Security tab.

Actual results:

No setting is available to disable "hyperlink auditing" or automatically sending background ping requests when clicking on a link, or related background analytics data submissions.

Expected results:

A setting would be present to allow the user to disable background sync/analytics requests like a-ping hyperlink auditing or Beacon analytics submissions.

The HTML spec requires user controls to alter automatic background hyperlink auditing requests:

User agents should allow the user to alter this behavior. For example, in conjunction with a setting that disables the sending of HTTP referrer (sic) headers. Based on the user’s preferences, user agents may ignore the ping attribute completely, or selectively ignore URLs (for example third party URLs); this is explicitly accounted for in the steps above.
https://www.w3.org/TR/html53/links.html#hyperlink-auditing

Before hyperlink auditing is turned on by default (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401352), this user control would need to be implemented. Currently a flag is available in about:config, which does not meaningfully allow users to alter this behavior.

Comment 1

[Nick Doty]

Existing issues note the need for UI visibility (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401352) and higher level concerns with the ping attribute (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401217). 401217 (from 12 years ago, when the feature was specced) mentions different potential levels (for example, limiting pings to sent over HTTPS or to the originating site or the number of different sites that can be pinged for a single click).

To respond in advance to some comments that have arisen in related discussions elsewhere: giving users the option to disable this feature does not immediately force sites to use alternative mechanisms for link click tracking. This feature (and how broadly it is enabled) is not detectable by client-side JavaScript, and not easily detectable by server-side code either. While non-performant alternatives exist for sites, just having the ability for a user to opt out does not guarantee that sites will choose the less-performant options. Currently, sites that do not implement link click tracking may feel more performant than sites that do implement link click tracking through redirects or synchronous or asynchronous+delay XHR. If sites that do not implement link click tracking will no longer have that performance advantage, one option would be to at least give meaningful user transparency and control when link click tracking is accomplished through this feature. That would enable good faith sites to get the advantages of link click tracking while also respecting the performance, resources, transparency and control of the user -- currently a combination that is unavailable to sites.

Comment 2

[Luciana queirolo]

Hi Nick Doty,

Thanks for the feedback, will set the component of this ticket to Preferences and set the status to New.