Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Disable local learning by default #2679

Merged
merged 46 commits into from
Oct 1, 2020
Merged

Disable local learning by default #2679

merged 46 commits into from
Oct 1, 2020

Conversation

ghostwords
Copy link
Member

@ghostwords ghostwords commented Sep 10, 2020

Fixes #2548.

  • Disabled learning by default
  • Hid hasn't-decided-yet-to-block domains in the popup when learning is disabled, as deciding to block depends on learning
  • Removed the option to show no-tracking-detected domains, unless learning is enabled.
  • Updated badge and popup to count (cookie)blocked domains only (instead of counting (cookie)blocked + hasn't-decided-yet-to-block domains)
  • Updated popup summary text to say "blocked X trackers" instead of "detected X trackers", as "detected" is inaccurate and misleading, at least when learning is disabled. (Consider opening the popup on a website with trackers unknown to Privacy Badger and learning disabled.)
  • Similarly, updated the wording and what gets counted in the "tell your friends" message
  • Added a prompt to popup (on update for existing users) to visit the relevant blog post
  • Updated the new user welcome page
  • Added blocking of all widget domains on extension install/update to ensure widget replacement happens for all users by default. (Widgets only get replaced when blocked; now that Badgers don't learn by default, if a widget doesn't get blocked during pre-training for whatever reason, it won't get replaced unless we auto-block all widget domains.)

To be followed by auto-replacing the tracker database on extension update when learning is disabled. Longer term, to be followed by #1299.

The new/rearranged settings on the options page:

Screenshot from 2020-09-16 12-55-00

The new summary text in the popup:

Screenshot from 2020-09-17 13-48-16

The prompt to learn more:

Screenshot from 2020-09-23 16-27-52

The rewritten section in the new user welcome page:

Screenshot from 2020-09-29 15-38-43

When local learning is disabled
@ghostwords ghostwords force-pushed the badger-next branch 2 times, most recently from 8fe7a45 to ce70180 Compare September 15, 2020 17:41
@ghostwords ghostwords merged commit 7394e2e into master Oct 1, 2020
@ghostwords ghostwords deleted the badger-next branch October 1, 2020 16:30
@ghostwords
Copy link
Member Author

@Gowee Have you seen our explanation for this PR? Let me know if you have any questions.

@Gowee
Copy link
Contributor

Gowee commented Nov 8, 2020

@ghostwords Thanks for the notifying.
I have read that days ago and fully understand the concerns on fingerprinting and possible attack surface illustrated in the article. I am just a little worried about the coverage of the pre-trained domain set hence "thousands of" sounds like just a tiny fraction of the Internet. The problem appears to be obvious for some websites with less popularity. There might also be other systematic problems. For example, I suppose a few popular websites in mainland China are not visited by badger-sett because their poor (WA)firewall prevents/gives a CAPTCHA for requests originating from foreign countries.
Anyway, I think it is the right direction. Hope the Badger keeps working well in the future.

@ghostwords
Copy link
Member Author

ghostwords commented Nov 9, 2020

Agreed! Badger Sett's coverage is indeed limited in a number of ways. In an ideal world, we would have rolled out community learning (#1299) before turning off local learning by default. We do not believe Badger Sett alone is enough.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
2 participants