Wait, so this means I dial a number and they link my identity to my browser to tell whether I've browsed a competitor's website in the past few days? Is this really how far tracking has come?
They link your phone number to a session/user along with ad networks who have stored cookies on your machine and use predictive modeling to guess at who you are/what you do.
It doesn't work on 90% of the HN crowd, people who block ads/disable javascript, or just don't do a lot of traditional "browsing", but yeah.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/open-new-tab-firefox-fo...
The only thing it doesn't have is a way to auto delete cookies without restarting (which expires session cookies, which is a native option).
That's how I use it, cookies default to session only and a few sites get saved across sessions.
Another easy tip is to separate out anything that requires persistent login (ex: gmail) to a separate dedicated browser.
Browsers need to be seriously redesigned with privacy (aka security) in mind. The javascript execution environment needs to be gutted to remove security leaks like screen/window size. And incompetently (/maliciously) designed APIs like websockets need to be thrown right out.
They then leverage a partnership with a large ad network, to see where they found that cookie, as well as other cookies, from other sites in their network. They then correlate where they have seen essentially your user footprint (collection of cookies and other identifiers from your machine) stored throughout their network, to put you in some kind of demographic or intent-based bucket.
When you include data from mobile apps that are tracking your location, this can get very scary. There is a small leap required in tying a mobile ID (your phone's unique identifier) to web traffic, but it happens. Obviously all depending on the level of data you "share."
They then run every user in these buckets through a machine learning algo, that tries to predict things. Income, gender, spending habits, life events, etc. They can determine where you live easily, zip codes, compare that to census data, etc. It's all a part of predictive modeling.
That is the tracking portion.
The other portion is just tying a simple customer service rating to your phone number.
So imagine you piss of several customer service reps, live in a low income part of town, and rarely spend money. You might be on hold for quite some time...
Hahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahhaha.
No.
I'm sorry.
If you go to the extremes, sure, everyone is trackable. I don't work for any of these companies, so I don't know what I don't know.
Feel free to elaborate.
There are definitely lots of 'tells' that someone is restricting their visibility, most obviously disabled JS. And I'm acutely aware that those things mark a person as interesting to corporate tracking, in the same way that searching for Tor and Tails flags people for government tracking. But it's hard for me to believe that the tradeoff isn't worth it.
First, because automated surveillance happens in bulk: not standing out from the crowd is no longer proof against observation. (The Panopticon metaphor is if anything behind the times; that only created the fear of constant visibility, not the reality of it.)
Second, because it's not clear to me that corporations take more interest in obfuscated users. Not only do they take more effort and overhead to fingerprint, they're quite likely to be worse business prospects. Using a VPN tells governments you're up to something interesting, but using uBlock tells ad networks that... I hate ads and am unlikely to click on them. In general, I expect that obfuscation signals that someone is a bad target for advertising and provides minimal information about their value as a customer service recipient.
That said, I've been expecting for years now that somebody will get cute and start profiling privacy-aware users for separate targeting. If they've got JS disabled and Firefox up to date and sending DNT, maybe it'd be more profitable to replace tracked JS ads with text-only TripleByte ads or something?
Other data that leak: User-Agent, Accept or Accept-Language, Accept-Encoding headers...
Also some 3rd party software may request to spy on you in the browser, e.g. Red Shell so called "analytics" used by many legitimate big video games on PC. It will spy on you in the browser and you agree to it in a kilometer long user agreement they shove in your face upon first launch.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
That was several years ago.
Or is reverse psychology!
Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line ...
It shouldnt take a cambridge analytica person to tell you that people who have bought Friend of the Pod shirts likely aren't conservative voters. They clearly need more of my data lol.
Everybody (including HN) was pushing for 2FA. People followed.
I still use it though, it's valuable enough to me to put up with it.
I don't have proof that any airlines were tracking how many times i refreshed or went to a competitors web site, but this has happened each time I went to look up airline tickets. So I'm not surprised that they track the number of calls, or anything anymore.
There's been a few different times that I saved $150+ just by using a different browser to order the tickets. Even if I never logged in, or even had an account to begin with.
One of the more recent examples is a few years ago, I was looking at tickets for a trip overseas. I would go to the first site, look at flights, then go to a competitors site, do same thing, go back and see my price went up $25 in a few minutes. Then I would check the competitors, and see their price went up some. I then changed to a different web browser, and it drops back down to the original price. That was 6+ years ago though, so maybe it's changed....? Probably not as much as I would like.
The tracking stuff is beyond ridiculous for those types of purchases.
If amazon can't figure out whether or not to advertise something to me after i've already bought the thing they're advertising while i'm signed in to their website, i don't have much faith in anybody's ability to fingerprint me from unauthenticated sessions across multiple mediums and multiple companies. I can believe somebody is trying to sell a service that claims to do this, but i don't beleive they actually can.
Looks to me that Amazon outsmarted you by so much, it overflowed and now you think you're outsmarting them :)
Honestly, if you're calling some support number they usually already have your name, home address, and so forth. There's plenty of information you can link to that.