Hacker News Reader

Comment by samtheprogram | Hacker News Reader

This is not true of any web browser because of fingerprinting. That’s the point of fingerprinting for ad networks.

You can try using a different device but even then, I occasionally get recommending things that are definitely influenced by my roommates (i.e. on the same WiFi)

Using something that prevents fingerprinting helps, but only if you don’t use that browser all the time — otherwise it’s just another fingerprint — and still on the same network.

View on HN

> This is not true of any web browser because of fingerprinting.

Some browsers, like the one you should be using, have anti-fingerprinting tech in them.

Anti fingerprinting is nice but if you get served ads based on your IP address you're going to need more than just a browser to escape tracking based advertising. Adblockers aren't good enough when websites you visit use first-party servers to forward data back to ad networks.

Serving ads based on IP seems foolish when very, very few people have a static IP. I'm sure that a healthy minority of folks on HN do, but we're hardly representative of the general population.

Your IP is a lot more static than you give it credit for. It's not like the dialup era where you get a new IP each time. For example I have a dynamic IP on my cable modem, but it might as well be static as it only changes after there is a long term power outage. Also, it's likely if you're on a home connection most often, then you only have a limited pool of 32k or so IPs, which dramatically lowers the bits of information needed to identify you.

European ISPs (at least some) change your IP every day, including IPv6, unless you opt out from the router's configuration page, as a privacy feature.

Apparently tracking data of Europeans has a much higher market price.

Mullvad Browser comes with the fingerprint protection of the tor browser and a VPN addon but you do need to pay for there vpn.

You didn’t finish my comment. Read the last sentence.

Anti-fingerprinting tech just produces a different fingerprint. Google knows e.g. when things are scrambled but certain other things stay the same.

Untrue, you can modify it enough to avoid giving it more entropy. Possible approaches include: - Spoofing browsers down to the TCP stack - Plausibily random values - Every possible bit scrambled on each request

You can see a similar thought-process behind Tor bridges so it is tried-and-tested. Noted that it is a much more difficult feat to accomplish in a full blown browser rather than network layer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com