[nine_k]

BTW I don't understand the anti-tracking absolutism. I don't care about being profiled as long as the profile lands me in a group of thousands of people like me. Yes, I live in ${CITY}, identify as ${GEDNER}, am approximately ${AGE_RANGE} years old, run ${BROWSER} under set to ${LOCALE}. This does not allow to easily harm me. If it allows ad networks to target their ads, so be it, uBlock Origin still works well.

But anything more precise would be uncomfortable.

[JohnFen]

That's a reasonable stance to take, certainly. I also think it's reasonable for others to be even more sensitive about it. I'm an anti-tracking absolutist because I am angered by the strong-arming, the deception, and the hacking around defenses against it.

The tracking is a constant assault, and I'm no longer willing to put up any of it, even if the data being tracked is relatively minor. Screw the bastards, they've burned one too many bridges.

[mbb70]

How do you feel about ${INCOME}, ${SEXUAL_PREFERENCE}, ${RACE}, ${WEIGHT}, ${RELIGION}? Those categories are at least as broad as the ones you mentioned and are absolutely profiled.

[nine_k]

Fine enough, if the ranges for each value are wide enough. Compare:

- $120-140k, hetero, white, 190-220 lb, broadly Christian.

- $137,500/y, prefers tall redhead females, Irishman originally from Cork, 197 lb, observant Catholic.

The first one is too unspecific, while the second could suffice to identify a particular person in a neighborhood.

What makes a butter knife safe is not that it's completely devoid of an edge, but that its edge is sufficiently blunt.

[throwaway937474]

Now substitute the first one for "gay", and you might get a death sentence in several parts of the world. Why does almost nobody on this site thinks about the wider world bedsides their own extremely privileged position?

I would very much prefer for advertisers to not even be able to determine my city, for personal safety. Throwaway account for obvious reasons.

[nine_k]

This is very true. Usually the discussion goes about tracking by commercial entities in rich Westernized countries, which, by no coincidence, are the principal market of the ad industry. (Yes, China exists and is a huge market, but commercial tracking is a minor problem here, compared to other forms of surveillance.)

If you belong to such a category that the mere belonging to it is a death sentence, if revealed, the situation is vastly different. You have to act more like a secret agent or a spy. This means constant, pervasive, fastidious opsec. Any death-sentence-invoking activities should be strictly separated from the normal civil life. Only use the normal browser to visit commerce, official news, and government web sites. Everything that is not openly pious and loyal should belong to ephemeral VMs with a fresh browser install every time (preferably several different), VPNs that are indistinguishable from legitimate web traffic, like XRay, truecrypt-protected media with some plausible deniability data, etc. It all takes quite some technical chops, but is not sufficient. Many other small details, related to technology or not, have to be carefully, well, sanitized, and any small slip can out you.

Such undercover life, while possible, is very tiring, takes a lot of extra time and energy, and noticing this also may mark you as suspicious.

Another browser API that may slightly help track you is a minor problem on this background, unless it pierces any of your layers of protection.

[mindslight]

Government and commercial surveillance are intrinsically linked and framing them as some dichotomy is essentially just a coping mechanism. It's quite plausible that someone in a category that is openly accepted in the western world ends up traveling to a country where that category has been criminalized, and then ends up in the sights of the authorities based off surveillance records/analysis bought from consumer surveillance companies in the western world.

[nine_k]

Fair enough. The difference is mostly how much the government limits commercial surveillance (eg in EU) or integrates / buys it as part of its own surveillance (not only China or Russia, but also many Western countries to a limited extent).

[codedokode]

I don't want any of my data be collected without my permission and without a negotiated monetary compensation and expect that the browser is on my side here.

Also the data about you can be used to charge you a higher price. For example, if a company knows that the user is reading HN, and we know that people using HN (expect for me of course) all are mostly filthy rich Californian software engineers or enterpreneurs so they should have no problem with paying a little more.