Feature Request: “Intelligent Tracking Protection”-alike about adblock-rust

[pes10k]

Hi @ron-wolf , thank you for opening the issue. I dont think Brave will pursue a ITP like approach, mainly because Brave's protections are currently strictly stronger than ITP in nearly all cases (and that we're building other approaches for the small remaining differences).

ITP broadly does three things (there are some other aspects too, but they're mostly about escape valves for the below)

1. Control who can have third party storage, and for what life time. ITP is a heuristic for who gets limited 3p storage. Brave blocks 3p storage across the board (with a very few minor web compat exceptions, that are limited to 1p-3p pairs, and which we have an underdevelopment approach to shrink further)
2. A tricky, very conservative heuristic for stripping tracking parameters from expected bounce trackers. Brave maintains a set of known tracking-related query parameters already that we strip off universally (i.e. we dont rely on the loosey heuristic). https://brave.com/whats-brave-done-for-my-privacy-lately-episode5/ has more detail if you're interested
3. Restricting the Life-time of JS accessible storage in the first party context. Brave currently already caps the lifetime of all JS set cookies in the first party context (and blocks all storage in the third-party context), and we're looking to see if we can be further aggressive here (so localStorage, indexDB, etc).

If its of interest, brave/brave-browser#8514 covers the approach we're pursuing to remove the few remaining 3p storage exceptions.

But, the main takeaway is that adopting ITP would reduce Brave's privacy protections, and result in re-enabling some forms of tracking, which we're of course not interested in doing :).

Hope that helps!

[pes10k]

@ron-wolf thanks much for the kind words and the offer! It'll probably be 2-3 months before we have a useful version of brave/brave-browser#8514 in nightly (its a very large, complex change from how Chromium handles things), but if you're interested then, we'd love to have more users testing it out and sharing their experiences with us!

[ron-wolf]

@pes10k Thanks for the patient and thorough explanation! Most sites have worked just fine with Brave, so I wrongly assumed Brave’s implementation was more conservative than, say, Safari’s. I don’t know too much about the implementation, but let me know if there’s anything I could help with regarding brave/brave-browser#8514!