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The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

kevinboone.me

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Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#131

Post by Buttons840 »

jwr wrote: post #124
doug_durham wrote: post #8

I agree with the points in the article. Fingerprinting of any kind is a major risk for personal freedom. At the same time I want to make sure that content creators are compensated for their work. Ad firms that employ fingerprinting stand between me and the content creator. That said, I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read. The ad based model provides a more streamlined approach to compe…

> content creators are compensated for their work I have a gut feeling that we've been tricked (by ad companies) into thinking that this is somehow realistic and that casual "content creators" can get meaningful money from us reading their articles. Realistically, while professional content creators can make a living, writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide meaningful income. Instead of trying to "…

You mean I shouldn't make a comfortable living off my valuable HN comments? I was about to consider this comment a good days work. Maybe if I put this comment on my own webpage it would be more valuable?

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#133

Post by mh- »

homebrewer wrote: post #68
aidenn0 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is price discrimination. Everybody would love to charge more money to rich people and less money to poor people, since that increases the total profit. The only companies that we directly allow to do this are schools, but having a premium version lets you approximate this.

Steam also does this. Most games are significantly cheaper in low-income countries like mine because otherwise they wouldn't make a dime here.

Steam is not the one doing that. Publishers decide regional pricing.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#134

Post by skydhash »

homebrewer wrote: post #68
aidenn0 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is price discrimination. Everybody would love to charge more money to rich people and less money to poor people, since that increases the total profit. The only companies that we directly allow to do this are schools, but having a premium version lets you approximate this.

Steam also does this. Most games are significantly cheaper in low-income countries like mine because otherwise they wouldn't make a dime here.

That's because you usually pay via credit card (or some other financial mean) which is cumbersome (and may be illegal) to spoof. But yeah, it can be hard to justify a subscription when it's the price of a full meal. Especially when other essential subscriptions (electricity, water, internet, cell services,...) is straining your monthly budget.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#135

Post by prymitive »

levocardia wrote: post #100
imiric wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that advertising is more profitable doesn't mean that the PPV model is not viable. It could certainly be so. Every site could set their own price, or specific tiers, which users can agree to, just like they do with subscription-based content today. The problem is skewed incentives, of course. Advertising is acceptable to most users and easy to integrate, so why should website authors go out of their way to p…

Do you think the fact that NO major content websites (NYT, substack, WSJ, ...) have settled on a PPV model is simply because they haven't thought of it? Or is it more likely that the numbers absolutely do not work?

I think it might be because with ad model you can sell profiling data many times over to different parties. You can’t do the same with a single charge.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#136

Post by FireBeyond »

jwr wrote: post #124
doug_durham wrote: post #8

I agree with the points in the article. Fingerprinting of any kind is a major risk for personal freedom. At the same time I want to make sure that content creators are compensated for their work. Ad firms that employ fingerprinting stand between me and the content creator. That said, I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read. The ad based model provides a more streamlined approach to compe…

> content creators are compensated for their work I have a gut feeling that we've been tricked (by ad companies) into thinking that this is somehow realistic and that casual "content creators" can get meaningful money from us reading their articles. Realistically, while professional content creators can make a living, writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide meaningful income. Instead of trying to "…

> writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide meaningful income

Nor, generally, should it. Sitting down one or two Saturday afternoons a month to write a blog post shouldn't be generating the income of a FTE.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#137

Post by mh- »

gruez wrote: post #96
dminuoso wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I infiltrate someone else’s computer, secretly run code in order to to exfiltrate data I risk prison time because objectively it seems to satisfy criminal laws over where I live. How do prosecutors in any modern country/state not charge this behavior when done by a website owner?

The difference is that there's implied consent to run arbitrary (albeit sandboxed) code when you visit a website. Moreover it's not the website causing the code to be executed, it's your browser. Otherwise if the bar is "code is being run but the user doesn't know about it", it would lead to either any type of web pages with javascript being illegal (or maybe without javascript, given that CSS turing complete), or a…

> if the bar is "code is being run but the user doesn't know about it",

.. would lead to all modern electronics being illegal, not just web pages with javascript.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#138

Post by NewsaHackO »

gruez wrote: post #130
NewsaHackO wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they still wouldn't be able to confidently connect his different fingerprints to the same individual, just that he is one of a group of individuals who fake their fingerprints.

It would depend on what your existing fingerprint is. If you're using some sort of rare browser/OS/hardware combination (eg. pale moon/gentoo linux/IBM thinkpad) it might be worth spoofing, but if your configuration is relatively "normie" (eg. firefox/windows/relatively recent intel or amd cpu/igpu)you're probably making yourself stick out more by faking your fingerprint.

The issue is that, especially on desktop, I doubt there are many fingerprints that more than 100 people have, given everything that they test. I would even suspect that most common desktop fingerprints are classified as bots.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#139

Post by 0xy »

drnick1 wrote: post #52

Firefox w/ the Arkenfox user.js is probably as good as it gets in terms of privacy. By default, this config burns cookies on exit, standardizes the time zone to UTC, spoofs the canvas fingerprint, and does other helpful things. Basically, it makes Firefox expose the same information as the Tor browser. In addition, I block most known advertizing/tracking domains at the DNS level (I run my own server, and use Hagezi's…

As someone who utilizes these tools for anti-fraud purposes, Firefox is just as trackable if not more trackable than Chrome (especially because you stand out by using a niche browser in the first place).

Firefox exposes a massive amount of identifiable information via canvas, audio device and feature detection methods. There's also active methods to detect private windows, use of the developer console and more.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#140

Post by temp0826 »

Xelbair wrote: post #11
doug_durham wrote: post #8

I agree with the points in the article. Fingerprinting of any kind is a major risk for personal freedom. At the same time I want to make sure that content creators are compensated for their work. Ad firms that employ fingerprinting stand between me and the content creator. That said, I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read. The ad based model provides a more streamlined approach to compe…

how about donating to the creator directly? not subscription, just occasional donations whenever people feel like it - content is more widely available, and people who really enjoy it or are well off can actually fund the development

I already pay my isp. Maybe they should work something out with them.
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