At some point we need actual consequences for sites that intentionally hide their tracking. It should be criminal. It is stalking and has real world consequences. Just because an exploit exists doesn't mean it should be used. That logic is like saying it is OK to break into a house because the lock on the door was weak. If we don't get real protections, at what point does it become justified to go offensive against sites that exploit things like this? If I found someone putting trackers on me with the intent to sell that information (harm me) I would defend myself. When am I allowed to do that in the digital world?

Quick side note here. I appreciate the research calling this out. We need to know the dangers out there to figure out how to protect ourselves, especially since governments don't seem to take this seriously.

Umm...But it is criminal. The GDPR, at least, doesn't care how you track users - whether through cookies, local storage, favicon or whatever other mechanism you've developed. If you track users you must follow certain rules, and if don't, you will be facing fines if/when you're caught.

I think two things keep the status quo where the end-user is exploited and attacked constantly. The first is the VC / Startup model. Because VC is the true customer, and not the end-user. The second is the current marketing and advertising model. Can it keep working well enough to be worth the money? When it's not, the bottom falls out.

Old business model: solve a problem for your customer, add some value, take home a cut. Current business model: solve investment return for your investors, get the returns by addicting your end-user to something they don't need. Future business model: ?

Isn't this covered by GDPR?

If you visit my eg. physical clothing store I'm allowed to monitor your in-shop behavior to better optimize my store for your needs. Same for a restaurant etc. That's how _you_ get _much improved services_ and I get _happier customers_.

Ofc I'm not allowed to freaking resell that data. THIS is the problem in online: releseling and data-brokers. Just KILL these categories of businesses off completely and make _them_ criminal (like even give f prison sentences to their operators).

We should get back to our sanity in ONLINE. As long as you're on _my (online) property_ and using _my services_ I can of course see EVERYTHING you f do, and should stop pretending I don't (as a business, ofc - anonymization exists and not any random employee can access any customer's data, probably should never access both data and identity correlated unless they're actively investigating some serious fraud). As long as I'm not sharing this data with anyone else, I should be 100% allowed to use every drop of this data to improve my services to you and totally differentiate myself from the incompetent competition that can't properly do this.

Data privacy (from EU's GDPR to... everything else) only helps big corporations fend-off competition from small startups or boutique shops that could easily out-compete them by offering hyper-personalized hand tailored micro-optimized experiences for their smaller number of customers based on the loads of data they collect from them. In the EU I've only ever seen these kinds of laws severely hamper small boutique or family businesses that wanted to hyperpersonalize to everyone's gain while big corpos easily surf around them with their teams of lawyers.

...we've all been brainwashed by this privacy psyop to sheepishly "fight for our privacy" in ways that are detrimental to us and only help our corporate oligarch overlords maintain an even tighter grip on power, while offering us worse and worse services. Wake the f up, DATA IS MEANT TO BE USED to IMPROVE goods and services, not remain uncollected or sit unused!