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> You could either stop using these services or How do you stop using a service when you have little or no indication that it does something like this before h

> You could either stop using these services or How do you stop using a service when you have little or no indication that it does something like this before hand, and afterwards the privacy is already gone? If I use a site and view my profile page and the url contains aa account id or username and some google or facebook analytics is loaded, or a like button is sitting somewhere, how am I to know that before the page is loaded? What if I'm visiting the site for the first time after it's been added? It doesn't even matter if I have an account on Google or Facebook, they'll create profiles for me aggregating my data anyway. > quarantine them to a VPN/incognito interaction Which does very little. I spent a few hours this morning trying to get a system non-unique on panopticlick, but the canvas and WebGL hashing is enough to dwarf all the other metrics. There are extensions to help with that, but for the purpose I was attempting, were sub-optimal (and the one that seemed to do time-based salting of the hashes wasn't working right). So, I don't have any confidence that a VPN and incognito really does much at all.

benreesman 7y ago
I assure you that a clean browser and IP will break any surveillance that I know about.
- kbenson 7y ago
  No, a clean browser and IP with the combination of what fonts I have installed, how my video card renders a canvas and WebGL instance (which may be affected not just by the video card you have, but the driver version used with it), my screen size, and a few other system level items that come through may or may or may not be enough to uniquely identify you. Along with linking to a prior profile if you screw up one time (or load a URL that has identifying information they can use), and you're busted. So, sure, a clean browser and IP and never logging into a site you're previously visiting might be enough, but who does that, and doesn't that halfway defeat the purpose?
  - benreesman 7y ago
    I appreciate the information-theoretic validity of your argument, but if you think that one of these firms cares enough about your buying preferences to burn enough compute to find that correlation then you either work for the CIA or are mistaken.
    - kbenson 7y ago
      It doesn't take a lot of compute resources to have multiple profiles, and when evidence of a high assurance level (a referring URL that is known to designate a specific user of a major service) to link it with other profiles that also have that designation. To me, that seems par for the course for any service that's generating profiles of browsing behavior and trying to make any sort of decisions based on it. It reduces cruft and duplicate profiles while also providing more accurate information. Why wouldn't it be done? > the information-theoretic validity of your argument The portion about canvas, WebGL and AudtioContext hashing is not theory at all, it's well known practice from years ago. Jest the other day here there was a story about some advertiser on Stack Overflow trying to use the audio hashing to tracking purposes. Hell, if you get enough identifiable bits of entropy, you can probably assume weak to strong level matching using a bit-level Levenshtein distance that's low enough.
      - benreesman 7y ago
        GitHub is always at your disposal. NV doesn’t sell the consumer cards to enterprises. So on AWS a multi-GPU box will cost you about 12 dollars an hour. If you can disambiguate, let’s just say 85% of profiles absent IP or cookies, well I think you just broke the academic SOTA and I’d love to make some calls. Cheat sheet: you can’t.
        saagarjha 7y ago
        > GitHub is always at your disposal. NV doesn’t sell the consumer cards to enterprises. So on AWS a multi-GPU box will cost you about 12 dollars an hour. I don’t see how this is related to the claim, since it doesn’t solve the problem. But the advertising company that I let run code on my website will certainly do the job pretty well, I’d say.
literallycancer 7y ago
You use something that blocks scripts (like uMatrix) with an aggressive ruleset. On some sites you'll need to allow things to make them work. If they are loading trackers from the same servers that they load content from, you can't do much without wasting more time than you want. I'd say it breaks most of the tracking though. More sites than you'd expect work without js or with first-party js only. It's annoying when you need to read a news site, because those are usually bloated garbage. Not a huge loss.
- kbenson 7y ago
  This was already with uBlock Origin. Also tried combinations of Ghostery and Privacy badger. All of it made very little difference for panopticlick, and that's probably a low-bar compared to what's common these days.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    I don't care if every site that I browse using this VM knows that I'm Mirimir. I don't even try to hide that. What matter is that my personas using other VMs, through other VPNs or Tor, don't get linked to my meatspace identity, to Mirimir, or to my other personas. And that's doable, I think.
    - kbenson 7y ago
      Yes, and you go through quite a lot of effort to achieve that, given your other comment. My main point is that the amount of effort you have to go through to achieve that is very high, and I wish it was considerable lower. There are technological changes that could help with this, and legal changes that could help with this. I think a comfortable place would be if you visit the same online location using your main browser using one IP, and a private browsing instance of that same browser on another IP (through a VPN, proxy, or just new public lease), it would be nice if there was some expectation they didn't immediately have a high degree of certainty you were the same individual. For the general populace, this falls on its face. Tor has quite a few mitigations to help here (e.g. simulated window/screen values), and Firefox has started to adopt some of them, but as mentioned here on HN frequently, Firefox sometimes has problems with CAPTCHAs and certain sites (I haven't had those problems, but I'm also not usually using it through a VPN), and I know Tor is sometimes blocked outright. The point is that until most these protections (technological and hopefully some legal) are mainstream, completely protecting yourself is a double edged sword, since you also ostracize yourself from some sites and services. Tor is the equivalent of walking around in padded, baggy clothes and a ski-mask. Sometimes, like in the snow, it may seem fairly normal. Other times, like at the beach, it may preserve your privacy, but it's very uncomfortable and may cause people to avoid you, if not outright shun you and run you off. If everyone starts wearing masks and covering their hair, if you do the same you probably have a fairly high degree of anonymity and privacy through it. In summary, I think Tor is a useful and necessary tool, but nowhere near sufficient for where I think we need to be generally.
KirinDave 7y ago
> How do you stop using a service when you have little or no indication that it does something like this before hand, and afterwards the privacy is already gone? It is small comfort for the average user, but the way you do it is use noscript. It makes the web awful, sure, but it won't happen to you. > It doesn't even matter if I have an account on Google or Facebook, they'll create profiles for me aggregating my data anyway. I sort of wonder what you envision this actually meaning. If I spam your website and you add a DoS filter for my IP, should I complain you made a profile of me? If when a user tries to log in I check the referrer to see if it contains a proper URL, have I violated your privacy?
- kbenson 7y ago
  > I sort of wonder what you envision this actually meaning. I mean it to respond to the common response people sometimes give in conversations like these, which is "that's why I don't use Facebook" or "that's why I stopped using Google services". For this conversation, whether you use Facebook or not is irrelevant, they still gather your information, and in the same way myriad other advertisers (or however they bill themselves) do through online tracking. Google and Facebook are large, and have a portion that's easily visible, but they are not the whole problem by a long shot. > If when a user tries to log in I check the referrer to see if it contains a proper URL, have I violated your privacy? No. Noting which door a customer came into your store seems fine to me. That by default customers come in wearing the logo of the last store they visited is weird, but entirely something they can control. Having people shadowing all your customers while in the store looking and listening for tidbits they can report back on to get more info about those people is pretty creepy. As you suggest, the way to get around most of that is to dress blandly and say nothing. Here's the thing, we're a market economy. There's a transaction going on, where we're trading away something (our information and privacy) to a company for some product, or possibly the right to view a product we might consider buying. How many people are actually aware of this transaction? If they aren't aware of the transaction, there's a name for that when it's a regular good, and it's theft (or fraud). The difference here is that most of our government systems don't apply any rights of ownership to this information, so our regular rules don't apply. I admit, they may not make sense to apply entirely, but at the same time, it's obvious that something is lost in the transaction, whether the person losing it realizes it at the time, or views it as important enough to make a big deal about when they notice.

benreesman 7y ago

I assure you that a clean browser and IP will break any surveillance that I know about.

kbenson 7y ago
No, a clean browser and IP with the combination of what fonts I have installed, how my video card renders a canvas and WebGL instance (which may be affected not just by the video card you have, but the driver version used with it), my screen size, and a few other system level items that come through may or may or may not be enough to uniquely identify you. Along with linking to a prior profile if you screw up one time (or load a URL that has identifying information they can use), and you're busted. So, sure, a clean browser and IP and never logging into a site you're previously visiting might be enough, but who does that, and doesn't that halfway defeat the purpose?
- benreesman 7y ago
  I appreciate the information-theoretic validity of your argument, but if you think that one of these firms cares enough about your buying preferences to burn enough compute to find that correlation then you either work for the CIA or are mistaken.
  - kbenson 7y ago
    It doesn't take a lot of compute resources to have multiple profiles, and when evidence of a high assurance level (a referring URL that is known to designate a specific user of a major service) to link it with other profiles that also have that designation. To me, that seems par for the course for any service that's generating profiles of browsing behavior and trying to make any sort of decisions based on it. It reduces cruft and duplicate profiles while also providing more accurate information. Why wouldn't it be done? > the information-theoretic validity of your argument The portion about canvas, WebGL and AudtioContext hashing is not theory at all, it's well known practice from years ago. Jest the other day here there was a story about some advertiser on Stack Overflow trying to use the audio hashing to tracking purposes. Hell, if you get enough identifiable bits of entropy, you can probably assume weak to strong level matching using a bit-level Levenshtein distance that's low enough.
    - benreesman 7y ago
      GitHub is always at your disposal. NV doesn’t sell the consumer cards to enterprises. So on AWS a multi-GPU box will cost you about 12 dollars an hour. If you can disambiguate, let’s just say 85% of profiles absent IP or cookies, well I think you just broke the academic SOTA and I’d love to make some calls. Cheat sheet: you can’t.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        > GitHub is always at your disposal. NV doesn’t sell the consumer cards to enterprises. So on AWS a multi-GPU box will cost you about 12 dollars an hour. I don’t see how this is related to the claim, since it doesn’t solve the problem. But the advertising company that I let run code on my website will certainly do the job pretty well, I’d say.

literallycancer 7y ago

You use something that blocks scripts (like uMatrix) with an aggressive ruleset. On some sites you'll need to allow things to make them work. If they are loading trackers from the same servers that they load content from, you can't do much without wasting more time than you want. I'd say it breaks most of the tracking though. More sites than you'd expect work without js or with first-party js only. It's annoying when you need to read a news site, because those are usually bloated garbage. Not a huge loss.

kbenson 7y ago
This was already with uBlock Origin. Also tried combinations of Ghostery and Privacy badger. All of it made very little difference for panopticlick, and that's probably a low-bar compared to what's common these days.
- mirimir 7y ago
  I don't care if every site that I browse using this VM knows that I'm Mirimir. I don't even try to hide that. What matter is that my personas using other VMs, through other VPNs or Tor, don't get linked to my meatspace identity, to Mirimir, or to my other personas. And that's doable, I think.
  - kbenson 7y ago
    Yes, and you go through quite a lot of effort to achieve that, given your other comment. My main point is that the amount of effort you have to go through to achieve that is very high, and I wish it was considerable lower. There are technological changes that could help with this, and legal changes that could help with this. I think a comfortable place would be if you visit the same online location using your main browser using one IP, and a private browsing instance of that same browser on another IP (through a VPN, proxy, or just new public lease), it would be nice if there was some expectation they didn't immediately have a high degree of certainty you were the same individual. For the general populace, this falls on its face. Tor has quite a few mitigations to help here (e.g. simulated window/screen values), and Firefox has started to adopt some of them, but as mentioned here on HN frequently, Firefox sometimes has problems with CAPTCHAs and certain sites (I haven't had those problems, but I'm also not usually using it through a VPN), and I know Tor is sometimes blocked outright. The point is that until most these protections (technological and hopefully some legal) are mainstream, completely protecting yourself is a double edged sword, since you also ostracize yourself from some sites and services. Tor is the equivalent of walking around in padded, baggy clothes and a ski-mask. Sometimes, like in the snow, it may seem fairly normal. Other times, like at the beach, it may preserve your privacy, but it's very uncomfortable and may cause people to avoid you, if not outright shun you and run you off. If everyone starts wearing masks and covering their hair, if you do the same you probably have a fairly high degree of anonymity and privacy through it. In summary, I think Tor is a useful and necessary tool, but nowhere near sufficient for where I think we need to be generally.

KirinDave 7y ago

> How do you stop using a service when you have little or no indication that it does something like this before hand, and afterwards the privacy is already gone? It is small comfort for the average user, but the way you do it is use noscript. It makes the web awful, sure, but it won't happen to you. > It doesn't even matter if I have an account on Google or Facebook, they'll create profiles for me aggregating my data anyway. I sort of wonder what you envision this actually meaning. If I spam your website and you add a DoS filter for my IP, should I complain you made a profile of me? If when a user tries to log in I check the referrer to see if it contains a proper URL, have I violated your privacy?

kbenson 7y ago
> I sort of wonder what you envision this actually meaning. I mean it to respond to the common response people sometimes give in conversations like these, which is "that's why I don't use Facebook" or "that's why I stopped using Google services". For this conversation, whether you use Facebook or not is irrelevant, they still gather your information, and in the same way myriad other advertisers (or however they bill themselves) do through online tracking. Google and Facebook are large, and have a portion that's easily visible, but they are not the whole problem by a long shot. > If when a user tries to log in I check the referrer to see if it contains a proper URL, have I violated your privacy? No. Noting which door a customer came into your store seems fine to me. That by default customers come in wearing the logo of the last store they visited is weird, but entirely something they can control. Having people shadowing all your customers while in the store looking and listening for tidbits they can report back on to get more info about those people is pretty creepy. As you suggest, the way to get around most of that is to dress blandly and say nothing. Here's the thing, we're a market economy. There's a transaction going on, where we're trading away something (our information and privacy) to a company for some product, or possibly the right to view a product we might consider buying. How many people are actually aware of this transaction? If they aren't aware of the transaction, there's a name for that when it's a regular good, and it's theft (or fraud). The difference here is that most of our government systems don't apply any rights of ownership to this information, so our regular rules don't apply. I admit, they may not make sense to apply entirely, but at the same time, it's obvious that something is lost in the transaction, whether the person losing it realizes it at the time, or views it as important enough to make a big deal about when they notice.