Fingerprints are the new cookies

They are not "new cookies". Fingerprinting has been a thing for close to 20 years now.

The whole cookies discussion is a successful diversion by the ads industry. It was never about cookies.

Fingerprints are used for over a decade already, nothing new, just users keep closing their eyes despite knowing, even advanced ones.

idk man fingerprints don't taste that good

I'm skeptical of this magic trick, maybe add a counter with the amount of times I logged in to the website. Or let me save some data to read it from another session. Otherwise lots of people can be identified by that hash, there's no proof that it is unique

>and the solutions Google has developed (Privacy Sandbox) kinda suck and have raised antitrust concerns so nobody uses them.

This is backwards. The antitrust concerns of removing 3rd party cookies led to them developing alternatives.

> Let’s give it up for Google - the biggest ad company on Earth

I think Google needs to be forbidden from causing more damage to the EU market. And there need to be replacements too, once we forbid this Evil entity from sabotaging EU citizens any further.

We also need real open browsers not controlled by greedy Ad companies.

I am also aware of the irony of using thorium here right now (based on the adChrome code base). If I use Firefox, I can not listen to audio since mozilla claims only systemd-pulseaudio using people can listen to audio. Well, chrome plays audio on youtube (which is also owned by Google, do people begin to see how big of a problem Google has become) just fine, so I have no idea what Mozilla devs are smoking. I could recompile firefox, to just use ALSA, but who in his right mind wants to compile a 1% usage base legacy browser that uses ancient technology to compile its outdated code base please?

See: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...

Mozilla gave up decades ago on fighting adGoogle. And it can be seen via small things too.

Ladybird may be a competitor at one point in time but they ban people from their github repository, which also sends the message "do not contribute to us because we don't care about you if you have dissenting opinions". Well, so much for real competition, when projects get all emo early on. You can't beat the evil adGoogle empire with wishful projections about "conduct of people". That's not going to work. I don't subscribe to any random ruleset made by random people I don't know and don't want to know when they resort to censorship. But hopefully more and more people realise that something has to be done about Google one way or another.

> See, the thing is, it’s not about you at all. It’s not really about the ads anymore either. Nobody cares about you. And if the police or your government happen to care, I’ll gladly take their money too.

> I look at all this data and I don’t see people. I see patterns. Patterns emerging out of patterns. A living, digital fractal state of the economy, society and human psyche. The crystal ball of the 21st century and it’s made of silicon! That’s the product.

> And to the highest bidder it goes!

> What does that make you then? A gear? An ox? A volunteer?

This does absolutely nothing for me. If this resonates with you, can you explain?

I can understand worry about a tyrannical government, and if you have something like a gambling addiction I can understand about ads. But the meta-level privacy fear about deidentified patterns - I just plain don't get it.

wow on chrome based browsers, the fingerprint survives even in incognito mode.

On Safari, fingerprinting doesn't survive in incognito mode. Same with Firefox.

Good thing I use different computers for different purposes, though it looks like using different browsers seems sufficient.

It’s a question of entropy. If your device is unusual in detectable ways, then the fingerprint has high entropy. But on my iPhone I suspect most of the things being fingerprinted are the same. How many other people get “smug koala”?

Fingerprints of one kind another have also been around for a very long time.

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Privacy people are insane to me.

Some of these guys sound like they erase their fingerprints off the plates when they visit a restaurant, and ask people to forget about them when done talking.

Like it or not, as web gets more complex, it will recognize you more. If you don't want that, just don't use the web - perhaps buy a farm and life off-grid.

I just don't get what's the appeal to this endless damn cat and mouse game.

"You're protected from the methods I use here. You disabled JavaScript, so this fingerprinting trick can't run at all. You're still vulnerable to network-based methods. Read on to see what it does to everyone else."

You took a guess. You guessed wrong

I have not "disabled Javascript". The software (pl.) I'm using to request and read web pages has no Javascript interpreter

I can also insert a CSP response header such as "default-src: 'none'" and get the same result ("...") even when using software that runs Javascript with Javascript enabled

This "data" does not seem very useful for advertising except perhaps something like "don's waste time trying to target this user as they will not see or hear the ads"^1

What are these "network-based" methods exactly

I never see any ads when using the www. I attribute this mostly to not using popular software controlled by companies or individuals that advocate for internet advertising. This software could be something as complex as an operating system or a "browser" or something as simple as a Javascript sourced/planted in a web page

Whatever these "network-based methods" are, they don't seem to be very effective at targeting me with ads

I generallly stay in textmode. Most internet ads seem to be graphical and/or audiovisual in nature

Hypothetically, if a "developer" tried to target me with text-based ads, I could easily filter them out

I already filter the text in response bodies using a local forward proxy

For example, the "score" on HN comments I submit never goes below 1 in the HTML I'm reading. In theory this helps avoid self-censorship

Here is an excerpt from rewrite.lua

   if host=="news.ycombinator.com" then
   body = string.gsub(body, "%(<span id=\"karma\">%d+</span>%)","")
   body = string.gsub(body, "-%d points","1 point")
   body = string.gsub(body, ">0 points",">1 point")
   body = string.gsub(body, "width=\"%d+\"></td>","width=\"0\"></td>")
   end