this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
1034 points (99.6% liked)

Technology

71313 readers
6422 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
L4s@hackingne.ws
1034
The Current System of Online Advertising has Been Ruled Illegal by The Belgian Court of Appeal. Advertising itself is Still Allowed, but not in a Way That Secretly Tracks Everyone’s Behavior. (www.bitsoffreedom.nl)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Pro@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
94 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

From time to time, important news gets overshadowed by other headlines, even though it could have a profound impact on our (online) world. To most of us, few things are more bothersome than the dreaded cookie banners. On countless websites, you’re confronted with a pesky pop-up urging you to agree to something. You end up consenting without really knowing what it is. If you try to figure out what’s going on, you quickly get lost among the often hundreds of “partners” who want access to your personal data. Even if you do give your consent, it’s questionable whether you truly understand what you’re agreeing to.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Leesi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 53 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Cookies are old news. What about browser fingerprinting which can track you across websites? https://www.amiunique.org/

There's basically no easy way to safeguard against it without making browsing nearly unusable.

[–] dean@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 2 days ago

GDPR is regarding personal data, which includes cookies as well as any other fingerprinting. Even though browser fingerprinting does not persist any data on a device itself, explicit consent must be gathered before it's used for processing (i.e. tracking) purposes.

[–] Brumefey@sh.itjust.works 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Yes! You are unique among the 3874720 fingerprints in our entire dataset.

If the website says that I’m unique in green font, it’s actually bad and should be red, isn’t it ?

[–] Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee 4 points 2 days ago

Happened to me, too. Fuck!

[–] Gsus4@mander.xyz 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But why unusable, why does a browser have to leak language, window size, time, extensions? Can't those be spoofed?

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A lot of those things are also required to render a webpage correctly.

[–] Gsus4@mander.xyz 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

But isn't most of that client-side processing? Can't I request a vanilla generic page and once it is in my browser to process it to shape it into the window size and extensions I want? Even if it is an adblocker: serve me the ad, I'll block it internally. But I suppose that for dynamic pages with js requests this would become hard to do.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah it's Javascript that's the issue that can just take all this data in the client and send it wherever. And that's exactly what's happening.

[–] EchoSnail@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What's the solution?

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I'm not sure a technical solution is feasible, other than dns-blocking these trackers. I suppose lawmakers need to spring into action to make this shit illegal.

[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago

You could probably set a cap on how many different fingerprinty attributes a script is allowed to grab before requesting permission from the user.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

That is indeed the solution.

A technical solution won't cut it. Here's a very convoluted example: the tag allows you to send the text "buy illegal drugs here" to kids!! Omg!!! What to do? Remove the tag? Obviously not. You ban the practice.

[–] farngis_mcgiles@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

oh fuck i'm unique on every browser 😨

[–] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

You will have your tor-connected 1024x768 anonymous window and you will like it!

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 6 points 2 days ago

tor-connected

You are unique!

[–] axEl7fB5@lemmy.cafe 4 points 2 days ago

Tor Browser in normal mode is quite usable though, you just can't use extensions and you need to start a new session whenever you use other websites so they can't track you via cookies. Mullvad Browser is quite similar too.