I can see my origional point was too broad to be defensible. But I was trying to explicitly talk about fingerprinting when I said... > unless you sign in while

I can see my origional point was too broad to be defensible. But I was trying to explicitly talk about fingerprinting when I said... > unless you sign in while in private browsing or the site is using some sort of user-agent / IP trickery it won't be automatically tied to your accounts I am aware fingerprinting exists. I have done fingerprinting. I am also aware that for advertisers fingerprinted data is not as valuable as login keyed data and a lot of places don't bother to do it. Acting on fingerprinted data often triggers the "creepy factor" and actually turns off the consumer from the product. I know several advertisers that will not allow using it for that reason. I was not saying it can't be done. I didn't imply it did. In fact I believe a study a few years ago showed that fingerprinting is something like 99% accurate if you can execute javascript code to read things like screen resolution. I was taking objection to assuming it is absolute that it does not prevent tracking and that it is automatically useless. Does it stop Google? No way. Facebook, doubtful. But does it stop some sites? Absolutely. On many sites it is very effective.