logoalt Hacker News

cocototoday at 10:51 AM1 replyview on HN

Today I have simply given up trying not to share my personal information. What I do instead is simply blocking all ads and don’t use apps/websites that can’t be used without ad blocking. They may have many personal details like my favorite ice cream flavor but I get zero ads so I don’t care that much (I would prefer no one having this information but I’m pragmatic in such terrible society).


Replies

Cider9986today at 12:07 PM

Unfortunately ad blocking is not effective against current cross-site and anonymous user tracking.

Fingerprinting is extensively used and can't be defeated without a decent hit to browsing experience. Mullvad and Tor browser are likely the best at anti-fingerprinting.

The only completely reliable way to avoid this tracking is by not visiting websites with fingerprinting. A tool that can help with this is LibRedirect which redirects you from sites like Twitter to privacy front ends like xcancel.

The extensive web tracking is detrimental to privacy, but it doesn't compel you to add additional PII like phone numbers, which is much worse than cross-site tracking for a surveillance capitalism threat model.