In my experience most people don't care about what the news tells them anywhere near as much as what's going on in their personal lives.
If they've got money and they aren't worried about paying their bills or the price of food or the price of gas and they can afford a nice place to live and can afford to send their kids to college and can take at least one big vacation a year and they're spending their time going out with their friends they aren't losing much sleep over news stories that mention war in Somalia, or some politician's latest scandal, or how deforestation is threatening the habitat of a bunch of animals. They might not like what they hear, but they'll feel pretty happy about their life.
When their standard of living declines and they have to cut back to make ends meet and they watch their children struggle in ways they didn't have to at their age and their grandma actually dies because she went outside people start to get upset and suddenly the constant news stories about the latest pointless trillion dollar war, and the politician stealing from taxpayers, and the huge decline in wildlife populations starts to hit differently.
> Yes, it's nice that computers and phones are super cheap and powerful.
It was nice, but that's quickly changing now that the consumer market is being ignored by chip makers who'd rather sell to companies building data centers
There's no problem with having a unique fingerprint. The problem is having a consistent one. Randomize the fingerprint every time and you're fine. The IP address problem applies to everyone, including anyone using tor browser. The only solution to that is not using your own IP address (VPN/proxy). If I were going to make a secure privacy focused browser it either wouldn't allow things like rendering SVGs (which have introduced vulnerabilities beyond tracking) and wouldn't allow much (if any) JS and only a sane subset of CSS.
This is a bad idea though, because any newly discovered means to get even a single data point results in being able to ID every tor user. I'd be better to have every tor browser always generate a random fingerprint so that even if the unexpected happens people will never get anything but random results.
> to have every tor browser always generate a random fingerprint
Browsers do not "generate" fingerprints. They expose data that can be used to fingerprint users. You cannot "randomize" this; even if you were to return random values for, say, user screen size, with various visual side effects, it would just be another signal to fingerprint: "Oh, your browser is returning random values? Must be a Tor browser user".
> it would just be another signal to fingerprint: "Oh, your browser is returning random values? Must be a Tor browser user".
That's perfectly fine! As long as they can't tell which tor user you are they can't track your browsing activity or associate it to any one tor user. That's the goal. Currently tor browser sticks out like a sore thumb by trying to appear identical no matter who uses it, which is fragile because any one data point unaccounted for unmasks everyone.
Ideally you'd have browsers randomizing what they send instead of reporting the same info every time. That way even a deviation from the "norm" can't be assumed to ID someone.
When I go to https://noscriptfingerprint.com/ all I see is a blank page. My browser is pretty locked down in other ways which probably helps, but I'm still taking that as a good sign.
> fingerprinting in general is a less than ideal side effect that gives you a minor loss in privacy
In what way is collecting a record of a person's browsing history a "minor loss" of privacy. For many people, tracking everywhere they go online would easily expose the most sensitive personal information they have.
> Most users seem to not care about ad tech/tracking as much as technical users.
Part of the problem is the misconception that the data being collected is only being used to determine which ads to show them. Companies love to frame it that way because ultimately people don't actually care that much about which ads they get shown. The more people get educated on the real world/offline uses of the data they're handing over the more they'll start to care about the tracking being done.
This is definitely a point that should be emphasized more in this discussion. Even still, where it ultimately falls flat (currently) is the lack of hard proof to show people that it's truly happening.
Also, the degree to which some are more comfortable with the personal privacy/'feeling of personal safety' tradeoff notwithstanding, the examples that do get media traction are predictably extremes that the average person doesn't feel applies to them.
If they've got money and they aren't worried about paying their bills or the price of food or the price of gas and they can afford a nice place to live and can afford to send their kids to college and can take at least one big vacation a year and they're spending their time going out with their friends they aren't losing much sleep over news stories that mention war in Somalia, or some politician's latest scandal, or how deforestation is threatening the habitat of a bunch of animals. They might not like what they hear, but they'll feel pretty happy about their life.
When their standard of living declines and they have to cut back to make ends meet and they watch their children struggle in ways they didn't have to at their age and their grandma actually dies because she went outside people start to get upset and suddenly the constant news stories about the latest pointless trillion dollar war, and the politician stealing from taxpayers, and the huge decline in wildlife populations starts to hit differently.
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