I use ‘little snitch’ on my mac. It’s a way to know what the web pages i am viewing are doing behind my back. But it is becoming a real p@!9 in the a$$ since more and more websites call for resources from other websites, cdns, etc. I get three or four dialogs (and sometimes many more) when little snitch is telling me about that the web page i just opened is running a javascript that wants to connect to a bunch of other sites silently.
What i would like is an 'intelligent ’ version that knows who is trying to track me and who is not. Who is wasting my bandwidth and who is not. I know I can approve or reject each site and little snitch will remember forever, but that is my problem-I dont know which of these myriad sites are ‘good’ and which are ‘parasites’. I would like little snitch to figure this out for me. Perhaps it could tell me what I will break if I reject a specific website. Now, there is simply no way to know ahead of time.
Perhaps it could tell me which of these sites are adtech partners and which are normal people?
And then there is the issue of cookies which little snitch does not manage.
I realize the whole idea of a cookie is so that you dont need to keep re-logging in to the same website. Or you do not lose your shopping cart. whatever-it’s a piece of memory in the browser and each little block of memory is indexed by the name of a site you visit. So every time you go to that site, it can fetch the cookie which has info you about what you were doing at the website. And when a site refers to an image server or ad server that too gets a cookie in your browser. The website or the ad server can put all the cookies in a database and can pull all the cookies from a specific user. Because each cookie has information about the website that put it into your browser, an ad server can then know all the websites you visited that its ads were in. Also the website can know which ads you clicked on,etc.
So this simple ‘convenience’ of a cookie has become abused and now websites deposit data into cookies just to create unique signatures so you can be tracked.
I would like the smarter version of little snitch to only allow cookies to be written for certain things-certain logins,etc and I would like it to figure this out by itself.
Is there an AI driven thing on any OS that does this?