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Have you heard of those projects trying to defeat behavioral tracking where, whenever you visit a page, it simultaneously opens a bunch of other random pages in
by laughinghan 7y ago
Have you heard of those projects trying to defeat behavioral tracking where, whenever you visit a page, it simultaneously opens a bunch of other random pages in the background, hidden from you, and simulates activity on them, the idea being that Facebook has no idea what actual websites you like to visit because it's lost in the noise? What if instead, whenever you visit a page, your browser or a plugin or a proxy server or whatever opened the same page simultaneously in a bunch of hidden background windows, with a random configuration of audio enabled/disabled, user agent, screen resolution etc fingerprinted characteristics?
That way, the page displays correctly for you, but the server has no idea your actual fingerprint.
There's some trickiness to get this to work right; the collection of fake fingerprints would have to have a certain amount of persistence, because if it was regenerated every pageload, the server could probably tell that only one fingerprint kept showing up repeatedly. Maybe each fake fingerprint should have a completely realistic-seeming browsing session, happening in parallel with your real one, with half the collection continuing on browsing even after you're done? Except wait, ads could just separately target every fingerprint, and it doesn't matter if 99% of them are fake as long as its accuracy for your real one is still good. To defeat that you need the randomized activity using your real fingerprint.
The ideal would be if this was done through a proxy server, which would then know every fingerprint ever sent to a website. It could then provide you with a random collection of past fingerprints that have actually visited the same website, so every visitor gets a collection of fingerprints randomly drawn from the same "bag", rendering visitors indistinguishable.