[1]Mozilla Firefox to Enable Hyperlink Ping Tracking By Default by
  Lawrence Abrams:

    Firefox
    Mozilla has told BleepingComputer that they will be enabling the
    tracking feature called hyperlink auditing, or Pings, by default in
    Firefox. There is no timeline for when this feature will be enabled,
    but it will be done when their implementation is complete.
    For those not familiar with hyperlink auditing, it is a [2]HTML
    feature that allows web sites to track link clicks by adding the
    "ping=" attribute to HTML links. When these links are clicked, in
    addition to navigating to the linked to page, the browser will also
    connect to the page listed in the ping= attribute, which can then be
    used to record the click.
    …
    When these links are displayed on the page, they will appear as a
    normal link and if a user clicks on it, there is no indication that
    a connection is being made to a different page as well.
    …

Mozilla feels it's a performance improvement

    While some users feel this feature is a privacy risk, browsers
    developers feel that trackers are going to track, so you might as
    well offer a solution that provides better performance.
    …
    When we asked if they felt that users should at least be given the
    ability to disable the feature if they wish, Mozilla stated that
    they did not believe it would have any "meaningful improvement" to a
    user's privacy.
    "We don't believe that offering an option to disable this feature
    alone will have any meaningful improvement in the user privacy,
    since website can (and often already do) detect the various
    supported mechanisms for hyperlink auditing in each browser and
    disabling the more user friendly mechanisms [ed: bold mine] will
    cause them to fall back to the less user friendly ones, without
    actually disabling the hyperlink auditing functionality itself."

  How is this "user friendly" exactly? Let's block all of the tracking
  mechanisms and let people explicitly opt in to share their data …
  especially considering [3]this method is already being used in DDoS
  attacks.

  Or maybe just be transparent. That the user doesn't know and can't know
  without parsing the HTML themselves that these are there is …
  problematic at best.
    __________________________________________________________________

  My original entry is here: [4]Mozilla Firefox to Enable Hyperlink Ping
  Tracking By Default. It posted Sat, 20 Apr 2019 06:50:31 +0000.
  Filed under: privacy,

References

  1. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/mozilla-firefox-to-enable-hyperlink-ping-tracking-by-default/
  2. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#hyperlink-auditing
  3. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hyperlink-auditing-pings-being-used-to-perform-ddos-attacks/
  4. https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=2726

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