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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't Ghostery allow in certain trackers if they're paid? I remember there was some controversy about their funding model.

I use uBlock Origin + uMatrix currently.

Your tracking situation doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility though.

1. You searched for Chicken Coops at a place. 2. That same laptop connects to your home Wi-Fi. 3. The user (you) who searched for chicken coups is connecting from a new IP. 4. Some ad engine rule says that IP belongs to a household (this probably doesn't matter; makes me wonder if people in a Starbucks get ads intended profiled against other customers). 5. Now let's just advertise chicken coupes to everyone in that house.

So in theory, this tracking attempt can be done with just a cookie and selling sets of IP+search word data, right?

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"Your tracking situation doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility though."

Indeed. That's what's so invasive about tracking - anything that can be done to track you, will be done.

What if my search had been something more personal? Something I didn't want my wife to know about?

There's no way to opt-out of all this. We're being force fed this for the benefit of some corporation, somewhere.

> Doesn't Ghostery allow in certain trackers if they're paid? I remember there was some controversy about their funding model.

The controversial thing was that you could opt-in to sending Ghostery data about what things it blocked, and Ghostery would then sell statistics about what things got blocked most often so publishers could update their website to replace the blocked items.

> makes me wonder if people in a Starbucks get ads intended profiled against other customers)

unlikey, at your home location, usually it is just the same few people all the time.

At a coffee shop there might a couple of the same people every time, but also lots of other random people. So would be easy to ID home location / office location / public space location.

Or perhaps they know the location is a coffee shop from their facebook location ID.

but they will know somehow

Two ways I'm aware of. If your time at the coffee shop is regular (arrive at 3:15 because that's when your break is from work) they can place you with other regulars (you go there with your wife every day after work, you get dark roast and she gets a tea). Second if you're a black hole of privacy features and everyone else around you is not... well you get identified that way. Like herd immunity there is a risk if your behavior makes you an outlier.

Imagine for a moment though that they can't serve you ads directly. I wonder if anyone has done research into saturating adds in a coffee shop for all the patrons? Everyone sees the same add for the Dallas Cowboys and triggers a conversation about football. Now you didn't see the add but everyone around you is talking about football.

> Doesn't Ghostery allow in certain trackers if they're paid?

That was another adblocker. I'm not 100% sure which one, so I'm not going to name them.

That's Adblock Plus and Acceptable Ads.

https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads

Yes, Ghostery was bought out. Regardless of what they say I wouldn't trust the current model. I currently use Privacy Badger instead.

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