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stego-tech 2 hours ago

Sandboxing in containers and manually exempting specific security tokens is arguably one of the better steps we can take in the immediate term, as are random agent strings and returning fake data for common prompts. Of course that only works in the immediate, because this, like advertising in general, is an arms race at the moment.

This feels like a regulatory question, not a technical one. We've repeatedly proven that with math and code alone, we can fingerprint and identify almost every unique person on the planet, given enough data points. The long-term solution seems like it should be severe consequences for data breaches (as in, corporation-destroying penalties for disclosure of PII, including fingerprint data) such that everyone only collects the data they need to provide the service in question and not a single bit more, deleting it as soon as it's no longer necessary. Right now there's no consequence if Google or Meta disclose huge swaths of user data, and thus no disincentive to collecting as much as they possibly can.

Punish the leaking of data, and suddenly you've raised it's cost to the point that casual players will nope out entirely. From there, it's the eternal back and forth of governments waffling between business and electorate interests.

gruez 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>We've repeatedly proven that with math and code alone, we can fingerprint and identify almost every unique person on the planet, given enough data points.

I'm very skeptical of this claim, especially in practice. Contrary to what many fingerprinting sites claim ("you're unique of everyone we fingerprinted!!"), browser fingerprinting can't possibly uniquely identify someone. Smartphones are pretty locked down and there's very few customization options that allow for fingerprinting. In the US Apple has around 50% market share in the US, and there are 30 iPhones models that are still in support. That means if you're an iPhone user in a city of 1 million, there are, on average, approximately 16.6k (500k / 30) other people with the same exact model of iPhone (and therefore fingerprint) as you. As long as you don't do anything to stick out (eg. living in the US but setting Denmark as your locale), you'll be reasonably anonymous.