Fingerprints are the new cookies

Posted by royfish 1 day ago

Fingerprints are the new cookies(royfish.dev)

703 points | 344 commentspage 8

ryanmerket 1 day ago|

[dead]

tornikeo 19 hours ago||

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.

earthnail 18 hours ago||

It’s a lot of work to collect fingerprints off plates. You can build surveillance that way but it scales terribly.

On the web you can do that much more efficiently. That scares people.

As in any defense/offense situation, it’s all about balance.

oulipo 18 hours ago|||

So you're basically saying the old "I have nothing to hide" argument which has been debunked over a million times...

In particular because "I have nothing to hide" means "I have nothing to hide until now, and because of the corporations and states that have access to my data are lead right now by people I trust not to misuse that data"

But if tomorrow the government change, and suddenly your searches for "gay bars near my location" becomes illegal, you'd rather this info not be in everyone's hands...

nuancedargument 9 hours ago|||

Goycattle like yourself ought to be executed for the sheer stupidity of your opinions. Privacy is the only reasonable response to the unhinged behavior of web advertisers, who will spend trillions of dollars and decades of research, who will bribe politicians, who will do everything in their power to figure out the shape of your butthole so they can perfectly optimize which sex toy ads to show you. It is utterly psychotic behavior and pretending it is anything else is the either dumbest or most malicious thing anyone has ever done in the last century. If restaurants were to frantically scan their dirty plates for fingerprints after customers are done eating, the customers would be damn right to try to wipe their fingerprints off. Obviously that isn't necessary, because restaurant owners aren't completely out of their minds. So why does the web have to be this way?

"By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising... kill yourself..."

cindyllm 6 hours ago||

[dead]

fsflover 18 hours ago||

Lack of privacy harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.

1vuio0pswjnm7 9 hours ago|

"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

1. Of course companies like Cloudflare are using the www user's choice to run/not run Javascript as a way to collect fingerprints and filter out users who are not using advertising-friendly software