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EFForg / privacybadger

Privacy Badger is a browser extension that automatically learns to block invisible trackers.
https://privacybadger.org
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Android support? #1084

Closed albell closed 5 years ago

albell commented 7 years ago

Hi guys,

So, I was psyched to get the EFF email about the PB 2.0 release. But, I've got a Android phone. I've visited the PB install page in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, and PB doesn't seem to be supported in any Android browser. W...... T....... F........ Am I missing something?

I love EFF. I want to see this project to succeed, beyond all of our wildest imaginations. But I have to scratch my head at the allocation of resources here. Mobile usage is approaching double that of desktop. We'll cross that line soon if we haven't already:

http://marketingland.com/digital-growth-now-coming-mobile-usage-comscore-171505

Is developing for desktop just easier? Why was a desktop release developed and released first? Mobile first, please!

I will donate hard cash towards a crowdfunding campaign for an Android release that has defined thresholds and deliverable dates. I'm sure I'm not alone. Tell me where to go.

pde commented 7 years ago

One way you can try Privacy Badger on Android is via the WARP browser which includes a port of Privacy Badger 1.x (we'll also work with Qualcomm to get that up to 2.x)

ccoenen commented 7 years ago

related to https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox-legacy/issues/271 which is marked "wontfix", but apparently just because it's the legacy repository. :-) So there's hope!

jawz101 commented 7 years ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/privacy-badger17/

It's right there

jawz101 commented 7 years ago

... Note it was only made available on Android just a week ago. There's no user interface so I can't really tell if it's doing anything. The only thing I notice is on a rooted phone is this file

file:///data/data/org.mozilla.firefox/files/mozilla/(profile name).default/browser-extension-data/jid1-MnnxcxisBPnSXQ%40jetpack/storage.js

But the file doesn't look like it's logging anything as the desktop version does. It just has this after a few days of browsing. On the desktop this would be full of logged sites:

{"snitch_map":{},"action_map":{},"cookieblock_list":{},"supercookie_domains":{},"dnt_hashes":{},"settings_map":{}}

albell commented 7 years ago

@jawz101 thanks. So it's... totally busted?

When I visit the project home page in Firefox 51 for Android this is what I see:

privacy-badger-site-12-15-2016-on-firefox51-android

This just after your big launch announcement. There's.... a lot of opportunity being left on the table here. Negative first impressions can be hard to reverse. Does this project have full-time maintainers? If not, how can users like myself help fund the hiring of them? Privacy can be a business, too, just like advertising.

albell commented 7 years ago

P.S. I just downloaded WARP. It's cool niche product for the determined user, but the design/marketing is painfully amateur. It's hard to see this becoming a mainstream product with a global impact. I'd love to see a clearer path towards mass adoption on mobile.

jawz101 commented 7 years ago

Well, I just go straight to the Firefox AMO page. Also, I don't even know if Firefox for Android is indeed e10s yet. When I go to about:support it still says multiprocess is disabled by add-ons. Now I think half of the problem is Mozilla still hasn't rolled e10s out to the mobile Firefox.

cooperq commented 7 years ago

Hi all, Lead developer here. The big blocker with android support is that mobile firefox still doesn't support web extensions. So if you want to see privacy badger on android go let mozilla know!

jawz101 commented 7 years ago

@cooperq check my post above. I can actually find Privacy Badger on the AMO mobile site while on my Android phone, install it, just doesn't do anything

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/privacy-badger17/

albell commented 7 years ago

@cooperq Thanks for the response. I'm new to WebExtensions, but I'm looking at:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/04/29/webextensions-in-firefox-48/

which says:

With the release of Firefox 48 we are announcing Android support for WebExtensions. WebExtensions add-ons can now be installed and run on Android, just like any other add-on. However, because Firefox for Android makes use of a native user interface, anything that involves user interface interaction is currently unsupported (similar to existing extensions on Android).

So is the lack of UI support the holdup? Is there a way to end-run around this, so that some version of PB2 can run on Fennec for the year 2017, before full support arrives?

mcomella commented 7 years ago

I briefly looked into this.

A list of implemented Web Extension features on Android can be found on MDN. For the back-end, I didn't check which ones are necessary for Privacy Badger to work.

For UI, the only currently implemented user-initiated UI element is pageAction. This is intended to be used for interactions on specific pages (e.g. if the page can be opened in an Android app, a button will appear in the toolbar to open that app) and, imo, wouldn't be a good fit for Privacy Badger. I think we'd want something more like the NativeWindow.menu API, which would put a menu item in the 3-dot menu. When this item is clicked, I imagine a new tab would open (or the content is overlaid on the current tab) and the user would see the same content as the Privacy Badger overlay on desktop.

The browserAction API is expected to add a menu item on Firefox for Android, but it's not implemented yet. Bug 1330159 is tracking this work and there is a WIP in one of its dependencies so I'd guess we might be seeing the necessary UI APIs earliest in Firefox 56 (release is 52 right now, Nightly is 55).

ghostwords commented 7 years ago

Cool, I'll be sure to consult how uBlock did the UI on Android when I get to working on our port.

The reason I haven't jumped on porting Privacy Badger to Firefox on Android is we still have some major bugs and performance issues on the desktop. For example, I'm currently working on fixing a tracking mis-attribution bug (Badger incorrectly attributes tracking to non-tracking domains) that seems responsible for a good chunk of our broken site backlog.

I hear you are frustrated and I am sorry about that, but try to see things from my perspective. Having working tests is essential to keeping a project like this (tiny team, open source) going effectively in the future. There is much to do besides implementing Badger on Firefox for Android, a platform with a pretty small market share.

If you'd like to see a certain feature get implemented, you could make a case for making that feature higher priority. You could report how your experience using Privacy Badger on Firefox for Android went. I know there is no UI, but it sounds like you installed and used it for a while (thanks to an addons.mozilla.org bug). Did you notice a difference in your browsing? Was it good? Bad? Or did it not work at all?

strugee commented 7 years ago

@jawz101 another really great way to contribute would be to write an Android UI yourself. Or find someone who's willing to.

jawz101 commented 7 years ago

@ghostwords @strugee I know I was grouchy so I appreciate the feedback. If I had the skillset I would be all over helping but certain forms of programming are foreign to me. I do SQL all day but this sort of esoteric programming... well, I respect the work you do. Especially given Firefox seems to be in a constant state of development and poor documentation.

As for the FFox for Android add-on- right now it looks like it simply doesn't write anything to the storage.js file found in /data/data/org.mozilla.firefox/files/mozilla//browser-extension-data\jid1-MnnxcxisBPnSXQ@jetpack.storage.js

The file gets created on app install but nothing is logged as I browse.

strugee commented 7 years ago

Hey @ShapeShifter499! Please don't add +1 comments, as they don't contribute anything to the discussion and just generate more email for the maintainers (and those who are subscribed to this issue) to go through. Instead, you can support issues by using GitHub's reactions feature (smiley icon at the top-right of each comment).

ShapeShifter499 commented 7 years ago

Did something change recently? Going to the official Privacy Badger site at EFF on Firefox for Android no longer displays that it's not compatible.

ghostwords commented 7 years ago

Yep, there were some fixes made to the website. Visiting on Android should suggest a couple of existing privacy tools for Android, but that may not yet be working.

lemnis commented 7 years ago

I was interested in the current state of WebExtensions within Android and checked if it was possible to make this plugin work with reasonable ease. Unfortanelly it still has some "small" issues.

Unfortanelly if you want to make this extension work within android right now, you will break it for other browsers and the current UI of the plugin doesn't help either.

I did make a fork (with no extra comments 😑 ) for everyone who is interested. https://github.com/lemnis/privacybadger

ghostwords commented 7 years ago

Very cool, @lemnis, thank you for your work!

Which parts of your WIP Android fork are incompatible with existing browsers?

When you say Badger's current UI is problematic for Android, what are the problems?

lemnis commented 7 years ago

1516 Added a pull request because we can add Android support without breaking it for other browsers. As result, I had to remove 1 feature compared to my previous commit/post.

Full detail:

Tested in Firefox for Android 56.0a1 (2017-07-18), should work from 55+. Did check chrome and firefox desktop, didn't see anything unexpected.

ghostwords commented 6 years ago

Status update: Privacy Badger is available for Firefox on Android as Beta software:

screenshot from 2018-01-03 11 38 42

ccoenen commented 6 years ago

Runs on my phone, I'll report back in case anything is nor working as expected.

aschrijver commented 6 years ago

I just installed the bèta.. worked perfectly for a little while.

But now there is no longer menu item for Privacy Badger where I can see the trackers and such. I can still reach the settings via the Add-ons menu, but that's about it.

Android Samsung S7, and Firefox 57.0.4

aschrijver commented 6 years ago

ok, a full phone restart brings back the menu entry :)

ghostwords commented 5 years ago

Resolving for now, as there aren't any clear followups at this point.