75 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
75 lines
4 KiB
Markdown
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# Geoffrey Frogeye's block list of first-party trackers
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## What's a first-party tracker?
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A tracker is a script put on many websites to gather informations about the visitor.
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They can be used for multiple reasons: statistics, risk management, marketing, ads serving…
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In any case, they are a threat to Internet users' privacy and many may want to block them.
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Traditionnaly, trackers are served from a third-party.
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For example, `website1.com` and `website2.com` both load their tracking script from `https://trackercompany.com/trackerscript.js`.
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In order to block those, one can simply block the hostname `trackercompany.com`, which is what most ad blockers do.
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However, to circumvent this block, tracker companies made the websites using them load trackers from `somestring.website1.com`.
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The latter is a DNS redirection to `website1.trackercompany.com`, directly to an IP address belonging to the tracking company.
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Those are called first-party trackers.
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In order to block those trackers, ad blockers would need to block every subdomain pointing to anything under `trackercompany.com` or to their network.
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Unfortunately, most don't support those blocking methods as they are not DNS-aware, e.g. they only see `somestring.website1.com`.
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This list is an inventory of every `somestring.website1.com` found to allow non DNS-aware ad blocker to still block first-party trackers.
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## List variants
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### First-party trackers (recommended)
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- Hosts file: <https://hostfiles.frogeye.fr/firstparty-trackers-hosts.txt>
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- Raw list: <https://hostfiles.frogeye.fr/firstparty-trackers.txt>
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This list contains every hostname redirecting to [a hand-picked list of first-party trackers](https://git.frogeye.fr/geoffrey/eulaurarien/src/branch/master/rules/first-party.list).
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It should be safe from false-positives.
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Don't be afraid of the size of the list, as this is due to the nature of first-party trackers: a single tracker generates at least one hostname per client (typically two).
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### First-party only trackers
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- Hosts file: <https://hostfiles.frogeye.fr/firstparty-only-trackers-hosts.txt>
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- Raw list: <https://hostfiles.frogeye.fr/firstparty-only-trackers.txt>
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This is the same list as above, albeit not containing the hostnames under the tracking company domains.
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This reduces the size of the list, but it doesn't prevent from third-party tracking too.
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Use in conjunction with other block lists.
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### Multi-party trackers
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- Hosts file: <https://hostfiles.frogeye.fr/multiparty-trackers-hosts.txt>
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- Raw list: <https://hostfiles.frogeye.fr/multiparty-trackers.txt>
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As first-party trackers usually evolve from third-party trackers, this list contains every hostname redirecting to trackers found in existing lists of third-party trackers (see next section).
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Since the latter were not designed with first-party trackers in mind, they are likely to contain false-positives.
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In the other hand, they might protect against first-party tracker that we're not aware of / have not yet confirmed.
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#### Source of third-party trackers
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- [EasyPrivacy](https://easylist.to/easylist/easyprivacy.txt)
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(yes there's only one for now. A lot of existing ones cause a lot of false positives)
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### Multi-party only trackers
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- Hosts file: <https://hostfiles.frogeye.fr/multiparty-only-trackers-hosts.txt>
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- Raw list: <https://hostfiles.frogeye.fr/multiparty-only-trackers.txt>
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This is the same list as above, albeit not containing the hostnames under the tracking company domains.
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This reduces the size of the list, but it doesn't prevent from third-party tracking too.
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Use in conjunction with other block lists, especially the ones used to generate this list in the previous section.
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## Meta
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In case of false positives/negatives, or any other question contact me the way you like: <https://geoffrey.frogeye.fr>
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The software used to generate this list is available here: <https://git.frogeye.fr/geoffrey/eulaurarien>
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Some of the first-party tracker included in this list have been found by:
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- [Aeris](https://imirhil.fr/)
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- NextDNS and [their blocklist](https://github.com/nextdns/cname-cloaking-blocklist)'s contributors
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