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The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
421–430 of 456 posts
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#422It is not really fingerprinting but I realized that ipinfo can place my IP on my house. I guess some stupid phone sent the GPS location. Isn't that supposedly under GDPR in Europe? Can I delete it somehow?
I work for IPinfo. If you're on a residential connection, the geolocation of that IP address is likely to be accurate up to the ZIP code area. We have generalized hints of location information from over 70 different sources. Then we aggregate them and we map this information based on population density in the geographic region. Sure, our data is becoming more granular, but it's not granular enough to detect individual houses from residential connections.
However, our data is improving for POI (Points of Interest). For example, with data centers, we're working on identifying the exact data center from IP addresses. Similar accuracy applies to airports, hotels, and conference halls, as they tend to have a large concentration of IP addresses in a very small area.
We do publish a lot of information on our research page: https://ipinfo.io/data-research
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you could integrate payment channels on top of private cryptocurrencies that would be enough. That “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. But my point is that even if a magical technical solution existed tomorrow then the same sites that collect data for ads would continue to do so for the much more valuable data on paying users.
People have been hacking on this "if" for a while, and I suspect we will break through to the other side eventually, probably by the end of the decade. The problem is really just that cryptocurrencies like monero want to minimize their use of scripting, because transactions with scripts are a heuristic that can be used to de-anonymize you. But payment channels require some sort of timelock, in bitcoin this is done wi…
Thank you for your lengthy reply but I still disagree. Both the technical problems and non-technical problems seem intractable to me. If cryptocurrency was going to fix this it would have done so by now.
> I think you mention in your blogpost that no one would want to support micropayments because of piracy. I consider this a massive advantage of the micropayment system. It's pro-piracy by default
If I am selling my content at 5 cents a page, what stops somebody cloning my page and selling it for 4 cents? What stops Google from summarizing my content, discouraging people from clicking through to my site? Is Google even allowed to spider my site if I charge for it, and what stops them if not?
That is the type of piracy I was talking about and I think it is just one of the many serious fundamental problems micropayments have.
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#424Firefox 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…
>Firefox w/ the Arkenfox user.js is probably as good as it gets in terms of privacy. No. It's LARP. You either don't care or go with Tor Browser and/or commercial antidetect browsers. But you shouldn't care, this issue of fingerprinting is overblown. (really reminds me of AI)
Why shouldn’t you care and how is the issue with fingerprinting overblown?
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#425I still haven't found a method that can fingerprint simple Firefox containers. I use automatic temporary containers as a rule, and rules for specific sites where I want to keep persistent sessions. I don't understand how temporary containers are still not a built-in Firefox feature, it seems like such a no-brainer solution for privacy.
Do you have a repo for this?
Just use any Firefox browser (I prefer Floorp) with the Temporary Container Plus extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...) and set automatic mode on.
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has a remarkably inconspicuous language selector, also using the names of countries rather than languages, located in the page footer. Compared to Dyson, Apple's list of country names is much more willing to use English in preference to whatever someone from that country would call it. This isn't consistent; many countries are rendered in their own language (日本 / Ελλάδα) and many aren't (Georgia / Kazakhstan). The…
That was my point. Not comparing Apple/Dyson/whatever, but showing that website do have this need. If this was designed and implemented as a standard at the browser level, we would get something better in the end, rather than re-implementations on each and every website.
No, you wouldn't. Having it done by the browser means it sucks. That is a very, very, very bad idea. You need to do it on the website.
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was my point. Not comparing Apple/Dyson/whatever, but showing that website do have this need. If this was designed and implemented as a standard at the browser level, we would get something better in the end, rather than re-implementations on each and every website.
No, you wouldn't. Having it done by the browser means it sucks. That is a very, very, very bad idea. You need to do it on the website.
Sure, if that suits you...
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#428The OP argues that fingerprinting is a "privacy nightmare," but we need to look at why it exists. From a pragmatic perspective, we are forcing two very different networks to run on the same protocols: The Business Internet: Banking, SaaS, and VC-funded content (Meta/Google). The Fun Internet: Hobby blogs, Lego fan sites, and the "GeoCities" spirit. You cannot have a functioning "Business Internet" without identity ve…
I find it a bit hard to relate to the "privacy nightmare". I've not worried about such things in ~27 years of using the web and are yet to notice ill effects from the stuff he worries about. I don't know if my ads are targeted because I have an ad blocker and don't see any. Maybe the answer to the nightmares in general is not to worry about stuff that doesn't affect you? Re insurers knowing you've been browsing heart…
I also think about this sometimes. On the one hand, I have a natural instinct to give away as little personal data as I can, and it intuitively makes sense to me that it’s in your favour to keep as much private as possible; I assume many of us here feel the same way. But on the other hand, it takes a lot of energy to keep track of all the data that you leak, and often you have to give up better tools or workflows for a small perceived privacy gain.
Does this matter? Even if I do everything “right”, nobody around me does it. I can try to keep my shopping preferences and my searches private, but there is so much to gather from everyone else who doesn’t care about this that my efforts are very likely in vain. Even without my cookies, if you have as much data as a big tracker does, you can definitely make pretty good assumptions about what I like.
The response I usually see to this is that if everybody cared about privacy, then the picture would be different. But I’ve been reading exactly the same argument about using Firefox for the last ~15 years, and look where the Firefox share of the market is now…
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then let's get rid of the business internet. Every single thing I dislike about the internet is from the business internet: tracking, cookies, fingerprinting, SPAs, excessive javascript, optimizing for engagement, data brokers, I could go on. "But won't you miss XYZ?" Nope, don't care, want it gone. If you can't be bothered to go to the store and get it then it probably didn't matter very much.
Those are some rose tinted glasses. Not having to drive a check to the city utility office to pay the power bill is quite the improvement.
You can mail checks you know.
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#430The OP argues that fingerprinting is a "privacy nightmare," but we need to look at why it exists. From a pragmatic perspective, we are forcing two very different networks to run on the same protocols: The Business Internet: Banking, SaaS, and VC-funded content (Meta/Google). The Fun Internet: Hobby blogs, Lego fan sites, and the "GeoCities" spirit. You cannot have a functioning "Business Internet" without identity ve…
> You cannot have a functioning "Business Internet" without identity verification. Yes, you can. Just like you can have a functioning grocery store without checking the identity of each shopper that walks through the door. What you cannot have is a free and democratic society or an efficient free market without robust protections for individual privacy. Privacy is the best shield the less powerful have from being abu…
Most grocery stores in every place I have lived have security cameras so that if you did something illegal you'd be identified very quickly. At this point this is even true of small bodegas.
Also scammers can't waltz into my grocery store from the other side of the planet and wreak havoc.
Ultimately you can use privacy enhancing tools, just like servers can choose to block them. I wish there was a better system but that's what we've got.