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This is not productive to this conversation. Please don't propose technical solutions for things that should be solved by law. Protection should be the default
by DCKing 6y ago
This is not productive to this conversation.
Please don't propose technical solutions for things that should be solved by law. Protection should be the default, and not up to your own cleverness vs. the cleverness of trillion dollar industries. If that is the fight you have to fight, you will lose either immediately or eventually (see also the next point).
Please don't propose technical solutions that are mostly ineffective due to the huge amount of brainpower spent on browser fingerprinting, super cookies and other means of persistence. Cookies were invented in the 90s, and the means of being more clever than those deleting cookies were invented soon after.
Please don't speak with such condescension about these topics. People might mistake your confidence to imply you are actually on to something, but if the solution to the problem was so simple it would have been solved already - and the industry behind this would be dead or pivoted away.
- emteycz 6y agoIt's the other way around. Things with technical solution should never be solved by law. Lawmakers and law enforcement is absurdly expensive and law has unforeseen side effects, we should use that only when absolutely necessary.
- DCKing 6y agoWe'll probably disagree on this, but I think we're well past the point where this is "absolutely necessary". Some of best engineering talent in the world is spent on engineering the internet to 1) misuse human psychological affinities to lure you in and keep you in and 2) build large profiles of you to make as much money from (1) as possible. Targeted advertising and the incentives it creates should be banned as a benefit to society.
- emteycz 6y agoThe technical solution wasn't even tried, I will agree with you after that fails. Also for example subsidy for Firefox and other independent browsers (of Google/MS/...) could be tried. Law should be the last resort.
- DCKing 6y agoI'm curious what the technical solution is you're proposing. I was considering OP's context of a technical solution that's "clearing your cookies regularly". Surely that's both not sufficient (not by a long shot) and being tried at some scale [1]? So probably you mean something else, but I'm not sure what. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_browsing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_browsing
- emteycz 6y agoFirst step would be making private browsing the default. Second step would be making strong, capable adblockers built-in. Third step would be something like Firefox containers, one for each domain. Fourth step could be analyzing network traffic for potentially fingerprinting information and blocking it. I am sure there is much more to think of.