Uhh okay, so they do exploit vulnerabilities, they just try to target victims who can be served ads? What a weird distinction.

▲ zamadatix 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most users seem to not care about ad tech/tracking as much as technical users. Even further, most seem to want to enable more tracking to [protect the children or whatever the reason is] pretty regularly (at least in opinion polls about various legislation). ToR users are not at all like that + could be harmed in a very different way... so I think it's fair to frame them differently even if I'd personally say people should be wanting to treat both as similar offenses because neither should be seen as okay in my eyes.

	▲	godelski 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		`> Most users seem to not care about ad tech/tracking` I don't think this is true. Most people don't understand that they're being tracked. The ones that do generally don't understand to what extent. You tend to get one of two responses: surprise or apathy. When people say "what are you going to do?" They don't mean "I don't care" they mean "I feel powerless to do anything about it, so I'll convince myself to not care or think about it". Honestly, the interpretation is fairly similar for when people say "but my data isn't useful" or "so what, they sell me ads (I use an ad blocker)". Those responses are mental defenses to reduce cognitive overload. If you don't buy my belief then reframe the question to make things more apparent. Instead asking people how they feel about Google or Meta tracking them, ask how they feel about the government or some random person. "Would you be okay if I hired a PI to follow you around all day? They'll record who you talk to, when, how long, where you go, what you do, what you say, when you sleep, and everything down to what you ate for breakfast." The number of people that are going to be okay with that will plummet. As soon as you change it from "Meta" to "some guy named Mark". You'll still get nervous jokes of "you're wasting money, I'm boring" but you think they wouldn't get upset if you actually hired a PI to do that? The problem is people don't actually understand what's being recorded and what can be done with that information. If they did they'd be outraged because we're well beyond what 1984 proposed. In 1984 the government wasn't always watching. The premise was more about a country wide Panopticon. The government could be watching at any time. We're well past that. Not only can the government and corporations do that but they can look up historical records and some data is always being recorded. So the reason I don't buy the argument is because 1984 is so well known. If people didn't care, no one would know about that book. The problem is people still think we're headed towards 1984 and don't realize we're 20 years into that world
	▲	pmontra 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		In my experience those users express a mix of surprise and irritation when they get ads about something they did minutes or hours before, but they accept that's the way things are. I joke that I'm a no-app person, because I install very few apps and I use anti tracking tech on my phone that's even hard to explain or recommend to non technical friends. I use Firefox with uMatrix and uBlock Origin and Blockada. uMatrix is effective but breaks so many sites unless one invests time in playing with the matrix. Blockada breaks many important apps (banking) less one understands whitelisting.

▲ exe34 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well presumably they want to make money.

▲ adastra22 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Painting fingerprinting as vulnerability exploit is your own very biased and very out-of-norm framing.

▲

SiempreViernes 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Instead of trying convince-by-assertion, maybe you could try offering an actual objection to the argument raised up-thread?

On what basis do you claim that software developers, who did not establish a means of for third parties to get a stable identifier, nevertheless intended that fingerprinting techniques should work?

▲

strbean 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There's a pretty big difference between:

1) wanting functionality that isn't provided and working around that

and

2) restoring such functionality in the face of countermeasures

The absence of functionality isn't a clear signal of intent, while countermeasures against said functionality is.

And then there is the distinction between the intent of the software publisher and the intent of the user. There is a big ethical difference between "Mozilla doesn't want advertisers tracking their users" and "those users don't want to be tracked". If these guys want to draw the line at "if there is a signal from the user that they want privacy, we won't track them", I think that's reasonable.

	▲	maltelau an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The presence of the "Do Not Track" header was a pretty clear indicator of the intent of the user. Fingerprinting persisted exactly in the face of such countermeasures.

▲

foltik 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How would you frame it?