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> It can only be obtained by making spying expensive and difficult. Yes! The only real solutions are client-side: IP-block trackers and encrypt your connectio

• Silhouette 12y ago
  The only real solutions are client-side: IP-block trackers and encrypt your connection. Even those actions have limited value as long as you have any other reasonably reliable signature as you navigate the Web. Anyone with a static IPv4 address for their home computers does. Anyone with a browser that will allow queries for a bunch of collectively-almost-unique properties of the host system does. Even certain standard web protocols inherently act in this way when used for their intended purpose. That means almost the entire web-using population is carrying around at least triple signature information, and if too many people start to block ads and trackers served via third-party systems, the major networks providing those things will just move to a model where sites hosting their ads act as proxies and serve the content from their own domain, which if anything would be slightly worse for privacy. This risk will remain until we get fixes for each issue I mentioned above. Leaving aside TOR and the like, we could move towards dynamic and rapidly rotating IPv6 addresses as points of origin with sufficient ISP support. Browsers could then close the other loopholes, but some of them will be difficult to fully eliminate and keep eliminated without compromising the user experience, because unfortunately some features that are useful for legitimate purposes are also inherently leaky.