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Comment by edoloughlin | Hacker News Reader

Before you continue... Yahoo is part of Oath. [...] Select 'OK' to continue and allow Oath and our partners to use your data, or select 'Manage options' to view your choices.

More Oath BS, where Manage Options leads you on a merry dance and does absolutely everything except allow you to manage any options.

I'd love to see Oath sites banned from here.

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While it'd be nice to ban sites that exhibit negative behavior, Oath sites represent some of the largest news properties in the world. Yahoo News is the #1 news site in the US, HuffPo is also in the top 10. Together, they have more traffic than the next 3 or 4 largest providers combined.

Further, several of their properties are specifically relevant to the HN community, including TechCrunch and Engadget. Not saying these are the highest quality sites out there, but they are the original source of reporting for many things discussed on HN. In fact, I see 3 different TC articles in the first 2 pages just right now.

One of the reasons I love my catchall email is catchall + password manager* throws a wrench in a lot of tracking. Even if you don't use Oauth, a commmon technique is to hash the email and compare the hashes. You can strip out periods or plus signs (ex: dontbenebby+hn@mydomain.com) but it's hard to track a person who gives a unique username, email, and password to every site.

(Though I guess they could intuit I'm the only one who uses my custom domain, but that'd be hard to do at scale)

*use PW manager because each site needs a unique PW

I always open these links in a private window, accept all the tracking, read the article and close the window.

Piggybacking on this (as I do it too) how robust is this method?

You've just given them permission to fingerprint you. If they're good at what they do then the private window trick had no effect.

Moderately. From a few years ago, I remember Yahoo was still able to triangulate pretty well on whichever device you were using, but had more difficulty across devices. Deduplication was a bit of an art at that point.

Can't they still track you by IP address? (assuming you have a unique address)

It would be nice if paywalled sites and sites with mandatory tracking were banned, yeah.

Yes. I am OK with accepting tracking cookies on other sites but I just close the tabs if they I see anything related to Oath as a matter of principle.

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