I suspect that many people who take an interest in Internet privacy don’t appreciate how hard it is to resist browser fingerprinting. Taking steps to reduce it leads to inconvenience and, with the present state of technology, even the most intrusive approaches are only partially effective. The data collected by fingerprinting is invisible to the user, and stored somewhere beyond the user’s reach.
On the other hand, browser fingerprinting produces only statistical results, and usually can’t be used to track or identify a user with certainty. The data it collects has a relatively short lifespan – days to weeks, not months or years. While it probably can be used for sinister purposes, my main concern is that it supports the intrusive, out-of-control online advertising industry, which has made a wasteland of the Internet.
↫ Kevin Boone
My view on this matter is probably a bit more extreme than some: I believe it should be illegal to track users for advertising purposes, because the data collected and the targeting it enables not only violate basic privacy rights enshrined in most constitutions, they also pose a massive danger in other ways. This very same targeting data is already being abused by totalitarian states to influence our politics, which has had disastrous results. Of course, our own democratic governments’ hands aren’t exactly clean either in this regard, as they increasingly want to use this data to stop “terrorists” and otherwise infringe on basic rights. Finally, any time such data ends up on the black market after data breaches, criminals, organised or otherwise, also get their hands on it.
I have no idea what such a ban should look like, or if it’s possible to do this even remotely effectively. In the current political climate in many western countries, which are dominated by the wealthy few and corporate interests, it’s highly unlikely that even if such a ban was passed as lip service to concerned constituents, any fines or other deterrents would probably be far too low to make a difference anyway. As such, my desire to have targeted online advertising banned is mostly theory, not practice – further illustrated by the European Union caving like cowards on privacy to even the slightest bit of pressure.
Best I can do for now is not partake in this advertising hellhole. I disabled and removed all advertising from OSNews recently, and have always strongly advised everyone to use as many adblocking options as possible. We not only have a Pi-Hole to keep all of our devices at home safe, but also use a second layer of on-device adblockers, and I advise everyone to do the same.
A bit more extreme than some, but less than you might think:
https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/
I even have a triple layer, DNS4EU has some great blocking options, then i run my own dnsmasq server with filtering options and in firefox also adblocking. Sometimes i get a site with a pop up that suggests disabling the adblocker to continue and then i turn off my in browser adblocker and presto theres the site with no ads.
Fingerprinting, together with cookies and AI bots are the root of all internet evil, but i am done with cookie banner clicking…. let them have my info and do with it what they think is good for them. Except don’t bother me when i’m browsing and watching movies….
Try the Consent-O-Matic extension. You can set it to automatically hide the popups and click opt-out for you.
Hans Arentsen,
The cat and mouse game will unfortunately continue, as the current status quo is not working.
Think of ads as “micro payments”, but they are more like crypto. You spend some time on the Internet, see ads during the day, and click one of them randomly, and they “win” a certain amount.
With the law of large numbers every website over the long horizon will have a steady income.
Now think more and more spending is captured with unnatural ads. For example, “coupon extensions” like Honey.
Even when you land on a product page from say a YouTube content creator, they would pop up “hey here might be 15% off”. When you click that they replace the original referrer with themselves. Now the page or video is denied one opportunity to get money, while a parasite sucks it off.
And as a “one two punch”… we spend more time online.
More time online = more websites competing for roughly the same total spending
PLUS
Less opportunities to get that actual referral bonus
=
Much less revenue per website.
Not sure what the solution would be, however there will definitely be a major shift.
IMHO … I think the concern about browser fingerprinting is a bit paranoid.
As per the article:
browser fingerprinting produces only statistical results, and usually can’t be used to track or identify a user with certainty
As long as the advertisers don’t have your name or any other personally identifiable information, I think browser fingerprinting is perfectly acceptable.
give them a fingerprint and they take a finger
How ironic, given that reading this very article makes you get tracked by Cloudflare (twice even, cloudflareinsights.com as well), Microsoft (a file called /track on visualstudio.com *and* Azure even), Google, Ko-Fi and PayPal!
This is a good place to plug the EFF’s Cover Your Tracks site. It provides a rundown on how unique your browser fingerprint is.
Btw,
If you tried to do actual privacy conscious browsing, in other words use Tor Browser with heavy locked down options…
You’d quickly realize how broken the web had become.
You’d be locked out of web pages due to not having cookies.
CDNs like Cloudfare will ask you to do captcha’s, but they never work (since they can’t track you they can’t enable the website)
Canvas and JavaScript is used for fingerprinting and they will also lock you out (crash, white page, or just broken rendering)