Your browser is spying on you

It should come as no surprise that websites are snooping on its users. However what baffled me was that the browsers (Mozilla Firefox, webkit and probably others) have joined their team. If your browser supports the navigator.sendBeacon() API, you should dump it right away (or atleast find a blocking mechanism).

 

API description from Firefox website


 
 


In the above screenshots, you can see the API in action for Webkit. Firefox doesn't even log these requests in developer console.

The sad part - it's not easy to turn it off. For Firefox, you have to use some extension and hope it does what it advertises. This bug report says they don't even want to change the default. Even for Webkit which is supposedly just a rendering engine the way to turn it off is convoluted.

You need to add a user script in the C code. Then in the user script JS, you need to override the function as below:

navigator.sendBeacon = function(a){};
 

In comparison, look at this other API for enabling page cache. Isn't this simpler?

webkit_settings_set_enable_page_cache(settings, TRUE);
 

 

Since turning off JS completely also turns off some useful features in modern web, your best defense is that you understand what your browser is doing under the hood. Without promoting anything particular, you should take charge of your browser about what it should or shouldn't do.

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