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My laptop is lying all the time. I change my UA, preferred language, my ip, mac and so on, because of tracking, terrible dev assumptions and personal preference

My laptop is lying all the time. I change my UA, preferred language, my ip, mac and so on, because of tracking, terrible dev assumptions and personal preferences. Yet, I'm a very good web citizen. Because of this, I often have to solve the same captcha many times before it thinks I'm human.

jart 4y ago
I don't doubt it. Given how rare people like you are, I'm sure a good citizen like you would also be perfectly fine sending an email to the service asking to be whitelisted, or having a second browser that isn't your daily driver for situations like this that doesn't try to obfuscate its identity by behaving like a bot.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  The first solution isn't practical (so many services to manually find a mail to send a message to, then interact with a human that might not even exist), and if you do, they don't whitelist you. I tried. Either they don't answer, or have "no way to have a specific whitelist for a single user in our system". So the second browser is the solution. But then the site will do all the bad things that I wanted it not to do in the first place. Like serving terrible French results instead of good English ones, or assuming Firefox doesn't work based on UA while their site work fine with it. And of course track me to death, sell my data, and so on. The only solution that works is to chose services you pay money for: they have your card, so they know you are not a bot. For years now, I have been suspicious of anything free. But it doesn't solve the tracking problem.
  - jart 4y ago
    Yes I understand the desire for capitalism rather than surveillance capitalism, but that's a derailment. The OP appears to be someone who just wants to build something cool and share it with other human beings. In that case, it's really helpful to be able to have a free practical way to address abuse. Would you really tell someone like the OP to stop expressing themself and shut down their service and put a paid one in its place? How can you charge for search when Google gives it away for free?
    - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
      I understand all causes and consequences of this problem, and I'm not implying there is an easy solution, only underlying that using "the user is lying" will lead to frustrating false positives.
    - nottorp 4y ago
      > The OP appears to be someone who just wants to build something cool and share it with other human beings. Only thing is, you don't know if that statement is true. Or they could really be wanting to build something cool but take advantage of all those "free" services and basically sell you to Google and Facebook.
- krageon 4y ago
  I won't lie, if you make an asshole system that bans me for doing perfectly normal things that make the internet work I'm going to assume I don't want to interact with it anyway.
  - jart 4y ago
    Then what would you propose that's better?

jart 4y ago

I don't doubt it. Given how rare people like you are, I'm sure a good citizen like you would also be perfectly fine sending an email to the service asking to be whitelisted, or having a second browser that isn't your daily driver for situations like this that doesn't try to obfuscate its identity by behaving like a bot.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
The first solution isn't practical (so many services to manually find a mail to send a message to, then interact with a human that might not even exist), and if you do, they don't whitelist you. I tried. Either they don't answer, or have "no way to have a specific whitelist for a single user in our system". So the second browser is the solution. But then the site will do all the bad things that I wanted it not to do in the first place. Like serving terrible French results instead of good English ones, or assuming Firefox doesn't work based on UA while their site work fine with it. And of course track me to death, sell my data, and so on. The only solution that works is to chose services you pay money for: they have your card, so they know you are not a bot. For years now, I have been suspicious of anything free. But it doesn't solve the tracking problem.
- jart 4y ago
  Yes I understand the desire for capitalism rather than surveillance capitalism, but that's a derailment. The OP appears to be someone who just wants to build something cool and share it with other human beings. In that case, it's really helpful to be able to have a free practical way to address abuse. Would you really tell someone like the OP to stop expressing themself and shut down their service and put a paid one in its place? How can you charge for search when Google gives it away for free?
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    I understand all causes and consequences of this problem, and I'm not implying there is an easy solution, only underlying that using "the user is lying" will lead to frustrating false positives.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    > The OP appears to be someone who just wants to build something cool and share it with other human beings. Only thing is, you don't know if that statement is true. Or they could really be wanting to build something cool but take advantage of all those "free" services and basically sell you to Google and Facebook.
krageon 4y ago
I won't lie, if you make an asshole system that bans me for doing perfectly normal things that make the internet work I'm going to assume I don't want to interact with it anyway.
- jart 4y ago
  Then what would you propose that's better?