| ▲ | amelius 2 hours ago |
| Can't we make fingerprinting illegal, as in, jailtime illegal? Would not solve everything but still help a lot. |
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| ▲ | chaboud 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'd rather penalize the application than the technique. Windows was rumored to long have "quirks" that would do better things for apps that had bugs that the OS ended up fixing instead of the app. Javascript systems have long had polyfills for varied browser feature comparability gaps. Whether you agree with these, making probing detection via fingerprinting illegal would take away this lever. Making surreptitious tracking via fingerprinting illegal? Even for state actors? Yeah, that's probably reasonable. If someone is going to wear a tracking collar in exchange for "free" services, a little disclosure makes sense. |
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| ▲ | Terr_ 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, the problem is how the data is kept and abused afterwards. |
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| ▲ | bloody-crow 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't think it'd be possible to define fingerprinting narrowly enough to not also outlaw perfectly normal and legitimate usecases. |
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| ▲ | chjj 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I'm not even sure I'd want to make it narrow. I'd start with: "Information gained via side-channel for the purpose of correlating individuals." But you'd have to add an enormous amount of legalese after that to make it ironclad. They'll start arguing "this isn't a side-channel", "we're targeting bots, not individuals", etc. You'd have to define every word in that sentence very carefully. I'd make it sweeping. "Individual" can mean "person", "bot", "suspected bot", "AI agent", "a piece of autonomous or non-autonomous software", basically anything. The "side-channel" definition might get trickier, but I'd rather legit use-cases get burned than privacy get burned. The OP was downvoted, but I agree. I think fingerprinting should be in the same criminal category as an illegal wiretap. |
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| ▲ | akersten 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why should it be illegal for me to recognize the way you walk into my store, even though you're wearing a mask and a trenchcoat? Some vague sense of indignation? Yeah, tracking bad, I get it, but are whatever damages that kind of legislation would prevent (probably nothing measurable) really more important than fixing the easy, in our face social problems that politicians could instead be focusing on? |
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| ▲ | chjj 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The analogy falls apart when "your store" is actually a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations that surveil a significant portion of the internet and covertly grant government agencies (and god knows who else) access to the data. It's passive surveillance on the order of billions of people. It's not a mom-and-pop shop. | |
| ▲ | thepasch 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Why should it be illegal for me to recognize the way you walk into my store If you did it in just your store, that wouldn't be a problem. The correct analogy, however, is "why should it be illegal for me to attach a perfectly traceable and invisible air-tag to you when you enter my store, without your explicit consent, and subsequently follow and document your every movement no matter where you go, as long as that location has a business relationship with my store, and also my store is the most popular chain on the planet that has business relationships with basically any relevant business that exists." And I don't think the answer to this one shouldn't be particularly difficult to arrive at. | | |
| ▲ | akersten 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well it's not really an airtag, I don't "attach" anything to your browser when I check what its GPU can do. That's just a description of you that I share with my other stores. Casinos, Target, Burger King, etc all do this when you get 86'd, for example. |
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| ▲ | kaladin-jasnah 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Isn't fingerprinting used across many different websites? Then the analogy would be a number of stores colluding to recognize the same person across all stores? (I have no idea, I don't know too much about this) | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which is famously done by casinos. But in practice many businesses big and small do share intelligence with each other about problematic customers who shoplift etc. |
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| ▲ | altcognito 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because you don't have a right to know everything about me, follow me to my home, my purchasing preferences, and so on and so forth. | |
| ▲ | lorecore 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Why should it be illegal for me to recognize the way you walk into my store, even though you're wearing a mask and a trenchcoat? If you have that right, the public should have the right to know you're doing this before they enter your store, so they can avoid it. Same with the websites, they should, legally, have to say they're about to fingerprint you so that you can close your browser tab and never come back. |
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| ▲ | codedokode 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Why don't you ask browser developers to stop adding features helping fingerprinting? Browsers even have some API for tracking ad clicks (attribution API or something) and user interests tracking API which nobody of the users needs. |
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