(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


software – Dropsafe

2025-07

I’m on Twitter, pointing out something which I consider to be so obvious as to be a truism: that a lot of our concerns about “online tracking” actually stand upon the behaviour of a bunch of code — and that rather than legislate and prosecute (etc) in order to regain privacy, we should instead simply demand changes in the behaviour of those pieces of code.

Some browsers are already doing this and are pitching these changes as an advanced security feature.

The physical world is hard to analogise to the world of digital defences, but it’s a bit like seatbelts used to be a security “feature”, and the peasantry could be left to die in minor collisions; and just as with seatbelts, when you make a bold proposition like “all cars should have seatbelts” you instantly draw critics who fall into various camps:

Be aware: like all physical world analogies this automotive metaphor will rapidly fall flat on its face, because we’re not actually talking about seatbelts; instead the proposal is to gradually genetically re-engineer every human on the planet to be incapable of dying from car-crashes — a concept which is unrealistic in physical space, but is perfectly reasonable in software.

But perhaps my biggest mistake was to raise the “if we don’t want cookies issued when using one website to be served as part of using another website, then perhaps we should just stop doing that in the user’s web browser?” — concept amongst a bunch of people who perceive (or are paid to treat) tech as something to be tamed, rather than as something to be shaped or rewritten.

Of course the technical mitigations I’m stanning for currently break a small pile of stuff (plus: that link’s content is very out of date) but — again — that’s no big deal over the course of a few years in tech. How long have we been fighting cookies? 10 to 20 years? The stuff that will break is largely grounded in behaviour that we’re complaining about. We should break it. The important bits will get rapidly fixed to accommodate the “new new”.

But then you get people who see “calling for software to be ‘better’” and “fixing (some of) the privacy issues ‘upstream’” as somehow elitist, and… well, it’s just so dismally pessimistic:

This eventually culminates in cheap shots like:

…and this is the other thing which I find disappointing:

Not merely do people seem disbelieving that we could change how all browsers — Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox and all other browsers — that we could lobby to change how those pieces of everyday software handle cookies.

One more time: I am not talking about “get everyone using Tor”, instead I am saying “let’s take some good ideas from Tor and get them put into everything.”

Not only that, BUT ALSO these same people consider it fit to haul out the “elderly people can’t drive technology” canard — but somehow I am the person who is supposed to be the “hyper tech literate” elitist?

My much-loved 70yo Kolkata-born, former primary-school teacher mother-in-law — an amazing woman — keeps in touch with her Guru using Signal “because it’s safer than WhatsApp”, and literally none of that was my doing.

Everybody deserves good security, and age is not a barrier to using software that implements security properly.

The first step is to demand it.
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/tag/software
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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