161–170 of 201 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about passing laws which forbid tracking users like this and levying steep, business-ending fines against the companies who don't step in line?
No problem. All your favourite online services are no longer free though, what a bummer. Will it be a lite, regular or premium Google maps subscription? How about Facebook Messenger?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about passing laws which forbid tracking users like this and levying steep, business-ending fines against the companies who don't step in line?
No problem. All your favourite online services are no longer free though, what a bummer. Will it be a lite, regular or premium Google maps subscription? How about Facebook Messenger?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that is a bit paranoid.
It's not though? If your goal is to avoid having your every move online tracked by companies hoping to earn money from spying on you, what Stallman does is one of the few strategies which work.
And I would say what Stallman does probably gives him a very unique fingerprint (wget ting web pages from a unique server). I doubt he is doing that for privacy.
If Google really wants to fix this, they could always have Incognito mode detection as a negative ranking factor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t need detailed tracking to run ads. Newspapers did it in the time before the internet. What did occur, is that advertisers could not be sure of performance so placed more value on the prominence and reputation of the media source. National well reputed papers got the best deals, regardless of real world performance. It will lead to tight localization again, as advertisers can’t rely on Google just selecting…
This it could have the side effect of killing independent journalism startups. Big media is already too entrenched. These big newspaper websites do already sell ads directly too - DoubleClick can serve both Adsense (usually as a backup) as well as their own inventory.
If Google really wants to fix this, they could always have Incognito mode detection as a negative ranking factor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I whitelist cookies; only sites that I have a known relationship to (e.g., HN, for login) get to set cookies. The overwhelming majority of the web still works just fine. It's trivial to pick out what doesn't, as it either tends to: a. require cookies for some inane task that doesn't need them, and it tells me this b. breaks horribly. Typically, JS trying to access LocalStorage, but not checking whether the call was s…
Or you can just freely allow all cookies from any website that wants to set them (sites will be happy and working), but only for current browser session. You have to remember to restart the browser every now and then, though. Then use whitelist to selectively allow cookies from some "friendly" sites to be stored permanently.
Overkill? Maybe, but it works for me.
Can this fight ever be won? If you've been browsing the internet for more than 5 minutes you already have cookies from some of the major ad networks. Therefore if you do not have cookies from the major ad networks, you're either a brand-new device or an incognito browser. All that is left to do is get in bed with the ad network to ask them if they have good cookies for this session. As it so happens most of the compa…
Incognito mode can be made to look exactly as if you opened your browser after creating a new profile and immediately opening the site. As long as they can’t afford to block these users it can be made to work.