this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Sadly, neither will truly protect you from fingerprinting.
Sure, but look at it this way. Fingerprints are benefiting the advertisers, and their purpose is to better target ads. Well I say fingerprint the hell out of everything, but I'll make sure no ads get through. If we all do that, what's the added value of fingerprinting then?
Sure. You can still be profiled, though. That can open doors for discrimination or other unsavory agendas. One also loses a measure of anonymity. Users don't clearly see how and know that they are tracked, meaning there's a loss of transparency.
It's not just about ads.
No argument from me. But we're talking about a byproduct of a commercial endeavour, without financial gain there would be less reason to do it in the first place.
If nothing else, at least they make less money and I have a better experience online.
They can block domains known to collect fingerprinting data but yes, they don't block fingerprinting itself.
When you go to The Verge and there's a full-screen pop-up about "our 872 partners store and access personal data, like browsing data or unique identifiers" those are all databrokers, and it's not just them, it's a fucking epidemic on the internet of sites that sell user data. The web has a cancer and it's called advertising.
PopUpOff gets rid of the box on most sites without having to give your consent. Can't remember the last time an annoying cookie disclaimer blocked me from web content.
I wasn't complaining about annoying cookie banners, I was complaining about data collection.
You can get rid of cookie banners with a normal ad blocker like uBO
Like, why not? The article says:
If I use Firefox and Firefox doesn’t send any fingerprint to the website, then how is it identifying me?
I get that if you use Android (which is normally tied to Google), you’re still subject to see it on Google websites, but how will it work otherwise?
This website explains it: https://pixelprivacy.com/resources/browser-fingerprinting/
Basically you send your user agent, browser and OS configuration like screen resolution, your primary system language, timezone, installed plugins and so forth as you browse the internet. Not so easy to block. In fact, avoiding fingerprinting 100% is almost impossible, because there are so many configurations. It is hard not be somewhat unique. Still there are ways to minimize the identifying information. Using Firefox, this is what you might want to read: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting. Note, though, that even there it says that such techniques can "help prevent websites from uniquely identifying you", not prevent it entirely.