171–180 of 309 posts
> San Pablo, California, United States > You appear to be in San Pablo, United States. Your internet provider is AT&T Enterprises, LLC. We know this because your IP address — 108.xxx.xxx.233 — was the first thing your device sent us
I am in San Francisco. IPs are not a reliable location identifier and never have been. Especially on mobile. Thank you for coming to my ted talk
How do we get our browser to stop sending all this information? It's really maddening.
Harder problem is getting the economic system that relies on this information swapped out. Have fun when 99% of web doesn't 'work'.
Maybe it's just because I am old, or have worked on internet software for almost 30 years, but none of this seems surprising or even concerning? Someone sets up a server that accepts connections to it and then someone sends a connection request to it. There has been no agreement on anything, no expectations or rules established. No one forces the server to accept any connection request it gets, and no one forces some…
Us not owing each other anything worked great in a prior era when people were largely correct in assuming most people were good actors. But as soon as the money and power of the internet became real, things started to turn more adversarial. The assumption of trust and lack of responsibility makes it easy for one side to take advantage of the goodwill of the other. And the technical and power imbalances inherit to the server-client nature of the web means that abuse is more likely to flow in one direction than the other.
Anyway, if you really want to know what your browser is sending:
> Where you were before > news.ycombinator.com This has always bothered me the most. I disabled the 'Referer' header once, but it breaks many websites.
It seems odd that any site would require a user come from somewhere.
Maybe it's just because I am old, or have worked on internet software for almost 30 years, but none of this seems surprising or even concerning? Someone sets up a server that accepts connections to it and then someone sends a connection request to it. There has been no agreement on anything, no expectations or rules established. No one forces the server to accept any connection request it gets, and no one forces some…
"We know the rest of it. We chose not to display it. Most pages would not have made that choice" this is written to frighten children maybe? Also that's not my internet provider. Maybe it's my ISPs upstream provider?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They track us around the web.
But anybody knows (in tech I mean) that a browser client leak a lot of things and sustained tracking is easy even cross-browsers (and cross-devices too with more advanced techniques), including history (easy to know which websites were visited with timing analysis in loops and iteration), it falls on the responsibility of the user to achieve privacy, but it requires heavy sacrifices that frankly most users are not wi…
We can see that big companies are able to do a great deal for privacy like Cloudflare and Apple (relatively speaking).
>Reality is that most do not care about privacy
Most people don't understand how much they are being tracked online, and even less know how to start preventing it. The vast majority of people care deeply about privacy. It is a natural human desire. Ask someone that says they have "nothing to hide" if they would be willing to let you install a camera pointed at their bed. Are they doing anything wrong in bed? Anything to hide? No. They still deserve privacy.
Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. [1]
Just because people don't care about the issue doesn't mean they shouldn't have the right by default. Privacy should be the default. It is bad for you to have less privacy because it gives governments, corporations, and other people significant power over you and allows them to harm you more easily. Also it is your right, just like the 1st amendment.
[1] Edward Snowden
I find this hyper dramatic LLM language extremely off putting, but appreciate the signal that allows me to completely disregard it.
Is this actually true? Because I don’t even know if I have any control over this on iOS, and if I do then I’d guess almost nobody diverges from the default?