Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jakobegger 3756 days ago
What else, besides using Tor, and turning off Javascript, does a user have to do that a website operator finally gets they don't want to be tracked?
4 comments

You could use the Stallman method and download pages with wget to read.
stop using repeat offending website
Very few users can detect that they are being tracked, so they can't avoid it. The tracking methods are designed to be undetectable; web beacons are invisible pixels; sites don't tell users: we track this info and share it with these people; even privacy policies usually are ambiguous, and they are too long and complex to read for every site someone visits.
because sites can be hacked or changed at any time, the ability of users to avoid offenders is basically zero.
Also use this EFF Privacy Badger: https://www.eff.org/de/node/73969
But this can't track individual users, it just provides general usage statistics, like visitor retention.

I'd be interested in a viable example of this being used to identify users.

That can help with fingerprinting. Any entropy escaping from a users session is useful.
This can be used to make a user's fingerprint stand out based on their browsing patterns. However, it is very fragile in practice. The tracker would need both a rare fingerprint, as well as a rare browsing pattern in order to identify a user.

This is pretty hard, considering the Tor Browser does a good job at having a common fingerprint at it's highest security setting (Javascript disabled, which is what this tracker is for).

I'm unsure why this is downvoted.

I think he is saying that users can't be tracked between page-loads using this method, or your risk sending multiple users the same token. (which is true, at least with this implementation)

The time they spend on the website, latency, etc can all be used to add to a fingerprint, but there isn't something magic that makes this accurate, especially without JavaScript.

Edit: please don't mind me ghostposting kthx

I may be missing something, but it seems to me that this technique(if not this particular implementation) could be used to easily track individual users.