Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
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Do webpages know if I'm on its tab or not? Of so, how do I get my browser to not report this information? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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On my university's website, there is a post login security check from Duo Security that just loads an iFrame once you enter your password, does whatever the hell it does, and apparently verifies that your login is legit (somehow).

But it only works when I'm on the current tab. If I log in and then switch to a different tab, it does nothing. If you switch back after a little bit, it will continue doing its thing as soon as you do, but wait too long and the session expires and you have to enter your credentials again.

Is it using some JS API to know whether I'm on its tab or not, or is it doing something even weirder? Is it possible to make Firefox report to every open page that I'm always on its tab, even when I'm not?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

This addon blocks the Page Visibility API: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/disable-page-visibility/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Yes, and they have for a while: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Page_Visibility_API

It's meant as a way to optimize the page when not in use but a sufficiently motivated entity could easily use it to measure your attentiveness to the content. I don't personally know of any extensions that disable this but it does require JS, so noscript would stop it (but likely also break most of the web for you)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

But with uBlock Origin you coul fine tune whichs parts of JS do you want to block on a site basis. It's pretty easy and imho one of the best extensions out there.