this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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Privacy
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Am I wrong to assume trying to blend in is a worse and contradictory strategy than trying to actively protect yourself from tracking?
If you want to not be unique, use default setting chrome without adblock. Your browser will look just like anybody else's, but they will literally know who you are.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, you lock everything down and spike as a very special browser and... that's all they know.
Privacy vs. anonymity
Not what I meant: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/3.3-Overrides-%5BTo-RFP-or-Not%5D#-fingerprinting
"If you do nothing on desktop, you are already uniquely identifiable - screen, window and font metrics alone are probably enough - add timezone name, preferred languages, and several dozen other metrics and it is game over. Here is a link to the results of a study done in 2016 showing a 99.24% unique hit rate (and that is excluding IP addresses).
Changing a few prefs from default is not going to make you "more unique" - there is no such thing."
Basically making yourself less unique is impossible so there's no sensible tradeoff to be made (other than in the context of Tor and Mullvad Browser).
Right. The question is whether they can attach what they know to an identity. Depends on your threat model which goal you need to achieve.
But then they can know a lot more since they don't even need to drop a cookie to track you. But that's a different threat model.