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Apple adds a tracker blocker to desktop Safari

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Re: Apple adds a tracker blocker to desktop Safari

#4

It's unclear to me how these "trackers" work? How do they track you, is it cookies, or what?

There are a number of ways. Cookies are one, but you can also collect other kinds of data from a web browser to uniquely identify a user across multiple sessions. Generally speaking, if you can run JavaScript, you can track the user. This is done by all advertisers and most little widgets like Facebook or Disqus comments, like and tweet buttons, etc.

Re: Apple adds a tracker blocker to desktop Safari

#6

It's unclear to me how these "trackers" work? How do they track you, is it cookies, or what?

In practice, User-Agent strings (which are just HTTP headers) have been shown to be pretty effective at uniquely identifying and tracking most people. So even disabling JavaScript and Cookies only goes so far.

Re: Apple adds a tracker blocker to desktop Safari

#7
post #5

It's unclear to me how these "trackers" work? How do they track you, is it cookies, or what?

Probably most (if not all) fingerprinting sources are showcased by fingerprint.js: https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs2

For a second I thought "why in the world is Valve maintaining this". Confusing username to be frank.

Re: Apple adds a tracker blocker to desktop Safari

#9

>“It’s not about blocking ads, the web behaves as it always did, but your privacy is protected,” he added. Does this mean browser fingerprint is somehow scrambled before it is sent to the tracker instead of blocking?

> Does this mean browser fingerprint is somehow scrambled before it is sent to the tracker instead of blocking?

It might be homogenized instead of scrambled. Every iOS device could be given (barring IP etc.) the same fingerprint.

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