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Comment by StevePerkins | Hacker News Reader

Wat? It's been years since I created my "real" Google account, so I just created "fakeasdlkvjasklfvjasdkljfgasdf@gmail.com" out of curiosity.

It literally took 20 seconds, with a fake name and birthday. There are form fields for your phone number and alternate email address, but you can leave them blank.

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bugmenot.com still works. Although an even better solution would be a browser plugin or add-on that, with one click, creates and logs in via a fake account populated with fake, throwaway info, changing every time you visit the site. Don't just avoid tracking, poison it. I'd help fund that kickstarter.

potentially related, Marlinspike's Google Sharing: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/googlesharing-a...

Even if you did that I think there are a lot of ways to identify you, using everything from your browsing patterns -- what sites, when and for how long -- to even just the account creation process itself; you'll still need to complete the captcha and with the "click all images that match" captchas that Google is currently using on reCAPTCHA (which btw was quite a bait-and-switch; they originally got a lot of people to use reCAPTCHA because the original purpose was to help book scanning, "read books, stop spam", remember?) as far as I've come to understand continuously sends your cursor position to Google servers, and with the movement data and the order and the timing that you press the images I would not be surprised if there was a pattern that uniquely identified you there.

Likewise websites that stream your input key by key instead of submitting the text when you press the submit button should in theory be able to easily identify you by the timing of your keypresses. I've only heard of a couple of instances of sending keys as-you-type but I think that if someone made the kind of project you spoke of above, then we would start seeing more tactics like the kinds I mention in order to counter that.

Even if you then proceed to disable JavaScript globally and only browse the web in 1.0 style with user-initiated GET and POST, the way that you write has some uniqueness to it that might be possible to identify.

I think it you want to make browsing data completely anonymous you're going to have to download a snapshot of the internet and unplug your connection. Unfortunately, that's really not the user experience most people want.

Or prevent a chunk of the Internet pages from abusing JavaScript, then use proxies such as Tor.

There's a chrome extension trying to do just that, hopefully it will ported to other browsers.

>> Kill Analytics[1] is a chrome extension that runs in the background while you use the web.

When you visit a website, it sends a little extra data to the server which breaks that site's Web Analytics. <<

[1]: https://hello-kill.github.io/

It has November 1st, 2016 as the release date but I can't find the extension anywhere.

Just tried this (again) and it does require me to enter a phone number.

See here: http://i.imgur.com/LFZjcvG.png

I used to think it was dependent on the IP from which you register, like whether it was a home connection or something shared with many people (like in a train or café), when obviously you'd want to use the latter (and definitely not the IP from which you've been mainly accessing your main Google account for years).

But this time I did try it from my home connection, which is in the Netherlands (though I selected "Germany" for my home country because Fravia+ has taught me well).

I wonder what makes the difference. Maybe if I had a US-based IP? Could be something with EU privacy laws. It should just clearly tell me, though.

Now, I won't whine about it when Google doesn't want to give me something for free. I will, however, whine about it when Google pretends I should hand over the thing it wants at no cost but for my own benefit. I will also whine about it when it purposefully obfuscates the cost/benefits and leaves me guessing like this. If it's a trade it wants, either be upfront about it, or be shady business.

Can you create a new account on every visit? If not you essentially volunteered to uniquely identify yourself.

Whether you want to opt out of tracking is irrelevant to the BS claim that it's difficult to create a google account. StevePerkins was specifically responding to the difficulty claim.

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