[wlesieutre]

> Do people 'see' what the sites are doing, and which? Does it matter if you just prevent it from happening?

Sorry if I've not been clear enough here. Let me explain my thought process.

uBlock Origin shows me this https://i.imgur.com/Vv2xyIL.png when I visit cnn.com.

In contrast, when I go to news.ycombinator.com, nothing is blocked. It gives me some idea of what companies respect my privacy and what companies are happy to sell my internet browsing history out to advertising networks and data brokers.

Yes, I'm blocking it as much as possible regardless, but I think it's still valuable to be aware of which sites are good actors and what sites are not. The little number on the uBO toolbar icon is a rough reminder of this.

> If they're not doing it in your browser then you don't need to block it in your browser, because they're not doing it, because they're doing it in their back-end (which is not your browser) instead of in your browser (which is).

The problem is not that the tracking is in my browser. The problem is the tracking.

If the tracking all happens server-side I have no idea what sites are tracking me and I can't do anything to prevent it. I can't even avoid it because I can't see what sites do it.

This is - from a perspective of not wanting to be tracked everywhere I go on the internet - worse than having javascript trackers on each page which my browser can choose to not run.

[tempguy9999]

That was helpful.

The original comment that you seemed to be replying to was "Right now it's really convenient for advertisers to run an ad auction right in the user's web browser because all the context is there". I thought you were saying blocking that crap in your browser didn't make a difference.

I can't see your pic because I never allow JS outside of a VM.

If tracking is enabled in a browser it becomes vastly easier for them to assign unique cookies to follow you. OK, now then can do it with etags and browser fingerprinting - mitigating the latter is possible, I don't know about the former.

But this...

> If the tracking all happens server-side I have no idea what sites are tracking me and I can't do anything to prevent it.

...is dubious. Etags and fingerprints aside, tracking non-cooperating (cookie declining) browsers has to be harder. I agree with you about tracking being the problem though.

[wlesieutre]

Harder on shared internet connections, for sure. But my apartment's internet connection is for the most part my own traffic, or guests who bring their phone over. Any traffic coming from that can be trivially tied to me.

I can use a VPN to hide my IP on most of my devices, except for when I'm trying to watch Netflix/Amazon/whatever. But I wish I didn't have to.

[tempguy9999]

There's a big difference between your ISP knowing stuff and the river of scum that is advertising.

> But I wish I didn't have to.

One way or other you will always have to. Perhaps the most important way of destroying the ad industry online is to have an alternative means of funding sites. Maybe that would work.

[wlesieutre]

Of course my ISP knows my identity, but my point is it's also probably not hard for an advertising company to get one piece of data that links my real identity to my cable modem's IP address, and then any tracking data they've previously accumulated can potentially be tied to that after the fact. They just need to tell when IP was assigned to me, which is probably easy to infer from a sudden change in what websites an IP is visiting.

On a related note, remember that time when AT&T and Verizon were just giving out the cell numbers associated with their customers' IP addresses to whoever asked, because they're complete fucking morons who thought that was a good idea?

https://medium.com/@philipn/want-to-see-something-crazy-open...