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Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

If you currently are minimizing your footprint, then this is a larger footprint (bad). If you currently have everything on by default, this is still a larger footprint because it's supplementing everything else, but may eventually replace it with a smaller footprint. Which could be better than the status quo (privacy-wise) but isn't better than turning off third-party cookies and not replacing them with anything.

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How? How would fingerprinting use this? It's formed by data used in the past 7 days and the bigger the space of FLoCs the more likely it is that it changes frequently, for example every day if not more frequently.

The fingerprinting would fail to recover the same code at least once a day unless you always visit the exact same sites every day and never visit a new one.

fingerprinting needs a stable state from the browser to work, not something that changes arbitrarily.

I'm not sure if it will aid in fingerprinting, although it is more bits of uniqueness. Even with sub-week persistent I'm pretty sure that helps if fingerprinting is used to track movements between sites, like ad click through rates or for intra-site telemetry. Heck, resolution is still considered valuable for fingerprinting and that changes when people reorganize their desktops.

But beyond simply fingerprinting, it still is providing some tracking. I've seen a lot of "anonymized" data turn out to be not so anonymized in practice, or reversible to a large degree.

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