[adiabatichottub]

I've thought about this, and I'm almost certain I've seen some basic tools to do similar. Call it "semantic chaffing". Maybe one example could be for every search query you make three random queries are generated. Random results are followed through their tracking links. Now it's much less clear to a dumb algorithm what your interests might be. Maybe a human or well-trained LLM could pick up the thread, but now it takes considerably more resources. It's a form of asymmetric warfare.

[MrVandemar]

Probably need something that periodically adds and removes fonts as well, at least once per day, probably more often. That's one element of fingerprinting.

[adiabatichottub]

Fooling device fingerprinting would be wonderful, but could never provide 100% cover against tracking, since any site you log into has has a user identity that can be tracked using your email or phone number.

Maybe we could break this into categories of knowledge:

* A user identity on any particular site, and the personally identifying information (PII) attached to it (email, phone, IP addresses used)

* A wider identity profile that can be stitched together via site user identities and browser fingerprinting

* The topical interests of an identity

It'd posit that to break tracking you'd have to disguise the first two by randomizing PII and browser fingerprint. Randomizing the third is more about making the collected data on personal interests useless regardless of identity, thus decreasing the value proposition of invasive advertising.

[JohnMakin]

Yea, this is why I think it's an intractable problem that cannot be approached from the device level, and needs to be more of a user-driven movement and more about spreading awareness. However, that doesn't make for sexy privacy selling service products, who mostly sell products that delete your data every couple of months and then it re-appears because the upstream sources just keep pumping the data into the well. It isn't a thing anyone really would usually care about either, until they are impacted by it, and as much as I care about this I can attest to it - I have got ads that led me to some really good products or creators I still enjoy. Just as many if not more times though I've gotten scammed or manipulated, and that's the part of the awareness that I think needs to be spread.

Tackling this from a technical level, to me, at this point seems infeasible. Feel free to inbox my email if you have any more thoughts about this, this is something that is difficult to discuss in such public forums.

I will just leave this - to me, people place undue faith in adblockers and extensions. That fixes only a part of the problem. You're also placing a lot of trust in your browser (not to mention the extension). If I really, truly want to determine who you are - from the perspective of a data miner - I can trivially hide all backend requests behind a proxy that you will never know about, and your adblocker will never know about. It provides a false sense of security that a lot of otherwise technical people hide behind.