Managing HSTS Data

I blogged about HTTP Strict-Transport-Security before and how it's all new and shiny in Firefox 4. With all the happy firesheep attacks on the horizon, it's made it even more important that sites start using HSTS.

In case you don't want to wait for your favorite sites to start deploying strict-transport-security, here's a way for you to enable it yourself. I whipped up a quick add-on proof of concept that lets you add and remove HSTS data.

There are two ways to manage HSTS data for sites using this add-on:

1. Navigate to an HTTPS page, open the page info dialog, and tick the "Always access content from this site securely" box
2. Choose the "Manage Strict-Transport-Security..." item from the Tools menu, and enter the host names for your favorite sites there.

Let me know what you think!

UPDATE: Instead of maintaining the add-on in parallel with Force-TLS, I've decided to adapt Force-TLS to use the HSTS bits built into Firefox 4 and show you the same UI. Instead of the STS-UI add-on, try installing Force-TLS!

behavioral advertising icon

I think self regulation in the behavioral ad industry is generally productive, but this IAB press release suggests the newest effort is promoting something that will induce a false sense of disclosure.

This Advertising Option Icon thing is something I heard rumblings about a little while back. The idea is to badge ads that use your behavior, and badge sites who collect your behavior for this use.

A couple of things make me skeptical:

First, this is a stigmatizing mark -- a tattoo that will label pages as "spying" to some and other simply won't notice. I'm willing to bet that such an icon won't be an effective indicator (no matter what the self-regulating body claims) since people
won't pay attention. We all know how poorly the lock icon worked, and people actually paid attention to that one. As an added disincentive, major advertisers have to pay yearly to use the tattoo.

Second, not just advertisers do this tracking, and the advertisers can capitalize on this. They would likely find a way to use third parties for data collection in order to get around the requirement of showing the badge.

Finally, the icon is a play button looking thing. Nothing in the visual suggests what's going on. A pair of eyeballs might be a more intuitive representation.

Icons in web pages aren't going to help. My opinion is that if we want to represent hidden behavior to users we have to have more flexibility. Such visual representations shouldn't be limited to ads, because if we start using icons to represent this tracking behavior for other contexts, the number of icons users must understand multiplies.

Aza's privacy icons project is a good direction; I think it would encompass what is being attempted here without restricting it to ads and with more efficacy since it would be one comprehensive set for all the web.