Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mike_d 1976 days ago
If you give me a demographic group (age, sex, income, etc) of a thousand people, and give me the IP address I can uniquely identify the individual within that group using outside data sources like Experian.
1 comments

> and give me the IP address

The Chrome proposal is that it won't: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness

What insane ramblings is this? Every site will be forced to use an approved CDN? Adding forced MitM to every connection is the opposite of what we should be trying to implement.
If you want to prevent fingerprinting, you need to look at where the identifying bits are coming from. (ex: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/) The IP address provides enough bits to uniquely identify many users, and when combined with just a few more bits, to identify almost anyone.

TOR is one solution here, which you could potentially also describe as "adding forced MitM to every connection". The proposals in https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness/blob/master/near_pa... and https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness/blob/master/willful... have different tradeoffs than TOR, with the "TOR is painfully slow" problem being a big one.

If you have better ideas, though, I would be very interested in reading them!