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by moron4hire
468 days ago
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You know fingerprinting is impossible to avoid, right? Adding WebUSB to the mix does not make users more fingerprint-able, because we've long, long been saturated at users being 100% fingerprint-able just because we can correlate their rough location from their IP address to the time of day they access certain resources. This is something that bothers me about Firefox fans talking about privacy and security in the browser. There really never was any. You fundamentally cannot be private on the Internet that we currently have, at least when stood up against motivated actors. But on the web, at least you're not blasting your identity to absolutely everyone. In direct contrast to every major native OS that makes it pretty easy to get not only the user's name, but their preferred email address. Or every major mobile OS that just hands app developers a tracking ID for every user. No need to fingerprint! The OS gives it to you! Oh, they fingerwag at you, "don't correlate these IDs month-to-month when we reset them!" Yeah, I get it. <wink wink>. So, when a browser that has been losing users year-over-year for the last 16 years and is now in "also ran" status blocks functionality for the browser, the one place where user identity is at least made hard, telling people they think it's better for developers to make native apps for the functionality, it's really hard to take them seriously on their word that they are privacy-conscious. |
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IP tracking is somewhat avoidable using things like Tor and iCloud Private Relay (not so much most VPNs, though), and even if it isn't, I'd still much rather be in an anonymity set the size of a densely populated ZIP code than one of size one.
> every major mobile OS that just hands app developers a tracking ID for every user.
Which ID does iOS hand to developers? I was under the impression this hasn't been a thing anymore for several OS versions now.