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Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit (www.404media.co)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by to c/privacy@lemmy.ca
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This is about cookie banners on websites

There was another time I got into a very serious ontological discussion with a fairly senior engineer about what the difference was between taxes and fines and they didn’t understand there was a difference,” he said.

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[–] 10 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Also, browsers still send so much unique data that they can be reasonably well fingerprinted. I don't really know all the things, but you can combine info such as OS, browser version, window size, list of extensions, HTTP request headers, timezone, etc...
Plus you could also track behavior.
And even with VPN some analysis might be able to figure out what you're looking at based on traffic patterns.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    https://amiunique.org/ shows you many of the things they can check for

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago

    Holy shit, that's a lot of data. I had no idea they could see what language packs I have installed on my keyboard. I have a pretty unique combination of languages, so that probably makes me really easy to identify across platforms.

    Is there an easy way to disable or block fingerprinting?

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    We need a browser extension that will add or remove a random number of dummy browser extensions per session to further obfuscate the fingerprinting

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Browsers like Tor and Mullvad have the right idea. They do all the most important privacy tweaks out of the box and encourage you not to modify it, so that way everyone using the browser has the same fingerprint which makes it much more difficult to track any one user.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Some VPN providers offer a setting that makes it harder to analyze traffic patterns. They make every packet the same size and send them at regular intervals along with extra noise. It makes everything look uniform so that AI can't match your traffic to/from the VPN server with traffic between the VPN server and your web activity.

    It might be overkill, and it adds latency and uses extra data. But for maximum paranoia, it's an option

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    VPN is only blocking your IP. Every other way they track well still work. I mean what does a VPN gibe you? encryption all sites are https hide DNS from ISP there is DOT and DOH. Last one is SNI that could be fixed by ECH if sites used it.

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