From now on I’ll call you: Try refreshing the page. Clear the cookies. Connect to a VPN.
You’re still the …. Now open it on your phone or some other device and your nickname will be different and just as consistent. Is it different in incognito? Good.
But it’s always the same? Bad news. Imagine this: Most websites you visit get paid to show ads and indirectly run my script that lets me know you’re the …. I can use it to decide what ads you’ll see.
But more importantly, if you’ve made an account on that website, I can offer to buy your data - whatever they can share under their privacy policy: your name, activity, conversations with AI… Pretty soon I’d know more about you than your friends do - perhaps more than you know yourself. "So what?" - you say. "I have nothing to hide. And I prefer my ads to be relevant… sometimes they show me exactly what I need! And the data is anonymised anyway…" See, the thing is, it’s not about you at all. It’s not really about the ads anymore either.
Nobody cares about you. And if the police or your government happen to care, I’ll gladly take their money too. I look at all this data and I don’t see people.
I see patterns. Patterns emerging out of patterns. A living, digital fractal state of the economy, society and human psyche.
The crystal ball of the 21st century and it’s made of silicon! That’s the product. And to the highest bidder it goes! What does that make you then? A gear? An ox? A volunteer? Remember the big fuss about third-party cookies? It was so big that the EU had already rolled out one of its greatest inventions - consent banners. If EU ships faster than tech companies, that can only mean the tech companies are sitting on their hands.
And one of those tech companies happens to hold two-thirds of the browser market. What was the play? Let’s give it up for Google - the biggest ad company on Earth! ACT I. PRESSURE - "PRIVACY IS PARAMOUNT TO US, IN EVERYTHING WE DO." It’s 2019 and the cookies are still hot.
It’s become bad PR and Safari and Firefox already block them. A year later Google pledges: we will destroy cookies!! And establish a new, privacy-first reign. ACT II.
DISTRACT ION - "INSTEAD OF DEPRECATING THIRD-PARTY COOKIES, WE WOULD INTRODUCE A NEW EXPERIENCE" 5 years later: people are now preoccupied with far greater worries than cookies, and the solutions Google has developed (Privacy Sandbox) kinda suck and have raised antitrust concerns so nobody uses them. "You know what, let’s just keep the cookies. We’ll mask your IP address* though!" (* but only when incognito while authenticated) (** in the end they didn’t even deliver on that) ACT III. ACCELERATION - YOU CAN NOW USE DEVICE FINGERPRINTING IN OUR AD PRODUCT S Now there’s a better way to know who’s who! How does fingerprinting work? Nice, let’s nerd out properly.
You visit a website. Your browser sends a request to the server and the server returns code for the browser to run. The request already reveals information about you; what browser you use, the language it’s in, the OS that runs it and your IP address, which the server needs to send you the response.
That often reveals your location. Then the code runs. See, we’ve made a lot of civilizational progress in making browsing safe.
Long gone are the days when getting a virus just by visiting a website was a daily concern. The thing is, the definition of safety varies depending on who you ask. The broad consensus ends at isolation: a website’s code can’t see the data stored by other websites, and it can’t see your files or other applications without permission.
Chrome and Edge stop here. Then you have Safari (especially on i OS/mac OS 26+) and Firefox extending that definition to privacy, but they still don’t fully protect you from fingerprinting. Brave and Tor are the leading privacy-first browsers, with up and coming Mullvad Browser (Mullvad being, in my opinion, one of the best VPN providers out there).
The code runs on your hardware, which can be measured in ways that produce con...
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing