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Comment by uyt | Hacker News Reader

Centralization is not always bad. Google is a single company and can be regulated so you can opt-out.

I guess I just don't care who makes money off fingerprinting as long as I can choose that no one makes money off me personally.

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I'm leery of any all encompassing systems that you can supposedly turn off with a single toggle. For example, you would think that not having a FB profile is the ultimate opt out but they have all your data as a shadow profile.

The REAL danger of fingerprinting is not on "some company making money of me through ads", it's that basically one or more entities, i.e. companies and/or governments, can identify you, your habits, political affiliation, localization etc, completely. And then they can modify the internet you see, censor what you can say etc. I couldn't care less about the ads part.

this post doesn't deserve downvotes. Googles size also makes them accountable. Decentralisation is useless if you end up in the wild west with 100 companies, none of which can secure your data.

I'd rather be on a well-regulated network that has the resources to have proper security in place rather than on fifty tiny ones who scrape very detail of my life and serve me crappy ads, this is basically how porn-sites work.

> Decentralisation is useless if you end up in the wild west with 100 companies, none of which can secure your data.

It's not useless, nor is it realistic to imply they are all unable to secure "your data" through their narrow lens. Treating "your data" as monolithic, necessarily implies attribution through centralization - all exchanges between multiple parties are at least a 2 way transaction of identity. It's the consequence of decentralization that there are gaps, not a fatal weakness.

The regulation is so far, USA or EU, not very promising. A slap on the wrists and no transparent investigation or explanation how data is handled, will not convince me.

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