3 ms·
Every now and then we see articles which dissect how the Internet works, and then are appalled at all the supposed privacy violations. Trackers are part of the
by octosphere 7y ago
Every now and then we see articles which dissect how the Internet works, and then are appalled at all the supposed privacy violations. Trackers are part of the web and have been for a long time. I don't see them going away soon. They fund the web and keep it moving along. We get into trouble when all our browsing is done in one session / container and no effort is made to containerize our browsing so that chatty scripts and trackers can't talk to each other via cookies as you traverse the web in any meaningful way.
Personally I divide up my browsing into many different compartments to avoid or seriously hinder tracking. I also only ever enable JS on a site if I really have to. I am suspicious of news articles that demand JS just to read a small bit of text. This is not some magic bullet - I know I will be tracked; but at least now my identity is divided up so much that it's hard to discern who I really am. Couple this type of compartmented browsing with an anonymous mixing network like Tor and it's game over for trackers.
Having one single container / session for all your activity (and without an adblocker like uBlock Origin) is borderline stupid in this day and age and can do more harm than good. The modern web has been designed to be as hostile as possible when you surf 'bareback' without an adblocker and without dividing up your sessions into discrete containers. Of course you will get people that like to surf bareback, with literally zero configurations in their browser and without an Ad-blocker. These are the people who are the most exploited, their every activity mined like it was oil - their whole life put into databases that could leak and be hacked at any moment, meaning they're very susceptible to 'doxing' or having their life ruined.
- JohnFen 7y ago> Trackers are part of the web and have been for a long time. And that's a big part of the problem. Just because something has wormed its way into common use doesn't mean that thing is acceptable. > They fund the web and keep it moving along. There are still large swaths of the web that this isn't true for. And for the parts that it is -- that's also a huge part of the problem and needs to stop.