Etags can be used to track you and likely are, especially at the network level. Additionally your network provider may be adding headers to your requests which enable you to be identified. Finally, your browser and device combination are probably configured in a way that gives you a fairly
unique identifier.
Ask HN: Refusing all cookies, still targeted by ads. How?
31–40 of 118 posts
Re: Ask HN: Refusing all cookies, still targeted by ads. How?
#32A proxy tracker can fingerprint without you even noticing.
Cookies just scale better.
Re: Ask HN: Refusing all cookies, still targeted by ads. How?
#33Cookies was a simple concept that politicians could glom on to and legislate around, but, yes, they're quite unimportant in the grand scale of things. In the end, you've got two things to work with: Things you can convince the browser to actively identify itself with, and the things you can track regardless. Cookies are in the first category, but they are not alone. You can get things as simple as presenting an entir…
My favorite thing from that uniqueness website is that it shows cookies enabled as more common and thus more anonymizing. Not that they wouldn't just fingerprint you using those cookies if it was enabled. The other interesting thing is that it lists my plugins and "do not track" settings. They are both fairly unique. So, someone who attempts to anonimize themselves using plugins or browser features are just highlight…
Yes, I reduced my plugins count in firefox to slightly decrease my uniqueness. piling on additional tracking prevention addons means getting tracked more.
Re: Ask HN: Refusing all cookies, still targeted by ads. How?
#34Cookies was a simple concept that politicians could glom on to and legislate around, but, yes, they're quite unimportant in the grand scale of things. In the end, you've got two things to work with: Things you can convince the browser to actively identify itself with, and the things you can track regardless. Cookies are in the first category, but they are not alone. You can get things as simple as presenting an entir…
I’ve been on a team doing fingerprinting research (specifically entropy sources). It’s amusing that you’re 100% unique and browsing HN commenting about fingerprinting. (You’re exactly a demographic that would be unique.) Most people aren’t unique, far from it. Consider iPhone 14 Pro Max users browsing through a 5G connection. All the users in the same cell look exactly the same. If I had to guess, based on what I kno…
I'm on Linux in Brave, so in general that I'm unique didn't surprise me. As you say, that part is expected. Stock Dell laptop, though.
Quite a lot of the specific details did surprise me though, to the point of wondering if there's a bug somewhere in their code determining percentages. "Audio context": "sampleRate : 44100, state : suspended" 0.05%? Gyroscope is a green check (I don't even 100% know what that means) and that's 0.13%? "Battery": "charging : true, chargingTime : 0, level : 1", 0.08%? (And is that even useful for fingerprinting over any significant period of time anyhow?)
Re: Ask HN: Refusing all cookies, still targeted by ads. How?
#35The ad tracking industry has evolved to do server side fingerprinting (Network, device U/A, Address lookups), canvas based fingerprinting.
Firefox blocks canvas access for this reason, which is a real pain now because it has actual usefulness. I hate advertising so much.
Like, advertising on its own is already disgusting. I've worked hard to prevent myself from seeing/hearing ads. But the fact that this industry has also turned into a nightmare panopticon is so stupid. I wish we could literally ban all advertising. Maybe an exception for coupons in newspapers.
Re: Ask HN: Refusing all cookies, still targeted by ads. How?
#36You’re using Chrome.
Re: Ask HN: Refusing all cookies, still targeted by ads. How?
#37There are plenty of ways to fingerprint you aside from cookies, as you’ve probably surmised (“sophisticated methods”).
Such as your IP address hehehe. Super sophisticated. Most IPs don’t change that much. Browse on Tor if you really want to avoid tracking.
This is one reason I use a VPN for almost all my personal browsing. That and I don't want spectrum to see where I'm going, because they will sell it. Like, I know a VPN isn't super-spy stealth tech, but it handles a couple basics pretty well and I end up hitting sites from a very generic IP.
Re: Ask HN: Refusing all cookies, still targeted by ads. How?
#38Depending on your ISP you may be able to change the public IP tied to your router. I did this, and found it significantly reduced what websites were able to track about me...for a while at least, until they learned again. But also, use a VPN.
Re: Ask HN: Refusing all cookies, still targeted by ads. How?
#39What do you mean exactly by "refuse all cookies?" The specific method you use will matter a lot.
If the first thing you do when you open the browser on a new machine is go immediately to Chrome's content settings and switch on "Block all cookies" then I'd be very very surprised to see successful tracking and remarketing.
If you just mean you're clicking "reject" on all of the cookie dialogs you see on various websites that's not going to do much.
Re: Ask HN: Refusing all cookies, still targeted by ads. How?
#40If you don't use DNS over HTTPS, (available in Firefox, maybe in some other browsers too) then all the pages you browse are leaked to your ISP, who is happy to sell that information to data aggregators. Since I started using DNS over HTTPS and uBlock Origin on mobile, I hardly ever get any relevant adds.