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You don't need to. The reason fingerprints are problematic are because you can't get rid of them. They link all of your activity together into a single profile that you can't turn off. Take a step back for a second -- why is it problematic to be able to link information to someone's real-world identity? Because who I am -- my address, my name, my face, and so on, is very difficult to change. It's a problem because once you've linked an activity to me in the real world, it's now permanently pinned to my identity. So with that in mind, what is the difference between tracking where I live and stalking me in the real world, and tracking what devices I live in and where I go online? In both cases, you're taking away my Right to Hide, and forcing me to use a single profile that I can't walk away from or operate outside of. Certainly, the difference isn't that the real world is harmful and the digital world isn't. You can abuse, stalk, price-gouge, censor, and deny service online just as easily as you can do it offline. If you have a persistent identifier for me, that links only to me, that allows you to recognize me on every website I visit, and if I can't escape that identifier, then you have already traced that information back to me as a person. Knowing my name or my address doesn't matter, those are just facts about me. 'I' as a person am the persistent identifiers that point at me. |