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by sillysaurus3 3268 days ago
None of these measures protect you against tracking, though. And if they don't, why use them? It's better to be honest with yourself and admit how effective tracking is nowadays.

Your user agent plus unique plugin installations plus fonts installed equals a unique fingerprint across IP addresses. The above isn't an exhaustive list, either. There are dozens of tricks to track you.

2 comments

Facebook can't track you by those metrics if a filter like Privacy Badger blocks requests to their servers.
Is it really that effective? I admit I assumed it was hard to dodge the global advertisement apparatus, but maybe it's possible.

Example: jQuery is sometimes hosted on Google CDNs. You can't block that request without breaking the site, right? But that request sends all your info.

Yes, it's really that effective - blocking the facebook like button doesn't break most websites.

And typically a request for something like jquery from a CDN will contain little more than your IP address and cookies. You can even prevent the cookies from being sent if you want. The only way they could get away with more than this would be to modifying the resulting script to grab more info from your machine.

Isn't your IP address plus cookies enough to track you?
Yes, but they can be trivially blocked or discarded. My main point is that no advanced fingerprinting tactics can be used so the simple means work in the case of most site-breaking things. Privacy Badger eats CDN cookies - that's actually one of its main features, so it will prevent this kind of thing quite nicely without breaking websites.
The vast majority of people correlate 1:1 with IP address alone, so I'm not sure how effective this is. Nonetheless, that's pretty cool.
Only works on desktop browsers. Fingerprinting doesn't work on Safari iOS. Pretty sure stock Android is unreliable too.