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Comment by olyjohn | Hacker News Reader

My favorite part is...

"First, large scale blocking of cookies undermine people’s privacy..."

Oh yeah, users and their privacy first!

"Second, blocking cookies without another way to deliver relevant ads significantly reduces publishers’ primary means of funding..."

Also we make less money when you do this... But users, privacy and synergy first!

I think the second point is the real issue for Google. But of course they care about users first! I feel cynical as hell, but the whole thing reads so slimy to me. Like a used-car salesman twisting an obvious negative into a positive. "That's not a giant rust hole, that's just to reduce weight for efficiency!"

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I think a great setup for privacy are temporary containers. In fact, using the Temporary Containers Firefox addon and domain level isolation works virtually everywhere except on Google / Gmail / Youtube...

That's because when you try to log into one of those, it tries to simultaneously log you into the other domains/Google products linked to your account and per-domain sandboxing prevents that.

My setup against tracking is as follows:

- Temporary Containers: Prevent cookie-based tracking

- ClearURLs: Prevent URL-based tracking, which Google and Amazon use everywhere

- VPN: Prevent IP-based tracking, to some degree

- uBlock Origin: Block adds and some nasty JavaScript

I find it quite hard to prevent fingerprinting. The privacy.resistFingerprinting in Firefox breaks tons of things. So does blocking JavaScript. And uMatrix is a bit time consuming to use, and not suited for inexperienced users.

Any alternatives considering aside from Tor Browser?

Your setup will marginally benefit from the addition of [Decentraleyes](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...), an add-on which prevents requests to CDNs by serving some content locally.

DNS filtering like pihole may be useful on your network for Ad blocking on Android/iOS. Not much more useful than ublock origin on your desktop though. Blocking at the DNS level is very effective.

I use Multi-Account Containers in Firefox plus the Cookie AutoDelete extension which integrates with it. Does the job for me. Here's my worry, though: the more broadly used cookie-blocking tools are, the greater incentive websites will have to use other, less-transparent methods to attempt to infer your identity without a cookie. These can be nefarious hacks that work like a cookie, or they can be statistical methods that estimate your identity with some degree of confidence. But one way or another, this would swing the pendulum back in the direction of sites knowing a massive amount about their users without users' awareness.

This will be an arms race and seems to be occurring over the course of decades. There will end up being extensions to regularize the timing of your keystrokes and mouseclicks because they give away your identity, VPNs will be integrated into the browser, anything to combat the information leakage.

> There will end up being extensions to regularize the timing of your keystrokes and mouseclicks because they give away your identity

.. and these users will be flagged as bots :) .. :(

> Also we make less money when you do this... But users, privacy and synergy first!

In practical terms, the point is important. Even if Google doesn't change their behavior to find other ways to invade your privacy, there are lots of other companies whose financial incentives point solidly that direction.

With enough people standing to gain enough money, someone's going to cross that moral line. Is this cynical? Absolutely. Correct? Almost certainly. Is it something we should take seriously as a result? I think so, though obviously opinions may differ on the subject.

Few publishers are confident in their ability to jettison an targeted-advertising-based business model for an alternative model that produces similar financial results.

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