Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS

Re:Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS by kodablah on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @09:12AM (#16158249)

While we, as devs, may get tired of the constant beat-down between site flexibility and privacy, many of our users are unaware. They will go blindly towards flexibility and we have a duty to find as much compromise as possible between those two values lest we just say "it's an easy fix, just turn off your computer". There has to be a middle ground between extremely paranoid turn everything off and extremely liberal with my anonymity (and on the internet, it's not governments who are going to help find it).

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Re:Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS by oneeyedpigeon on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @09:20AM (#16158314)

I guess my point is "how much anonymity is it reasonable to expect?" Should I have a problem with the fact that nigh-on every URL in the world will leave behind a little footprint when I request it? I don't see an enormous problem with a website anonymously recording the fact that I've clicked a link.

("anonymously" assuming I'm blocking their cookies, which I would if I were that paranoid)

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Re:Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS by fixermark on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @01:04PM (#16160382)

> ("anonymously" assuming I'm blocking their cookies, which I would if I were that paranoid)

Note that cookies are mostly a convenience vis-a-vis tracking. For user tracking, there's nothing really stopping the server from vending you a version of their site with custom CSS that loads images with a fingerprint in the URL, which would still work with cookies disabled. That'll get you coherent signal on a session (gluing different sessions together would be a bit more challenging, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were possible).

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Re:Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS by philliphaydon on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @11:34AM (#16159412)

I don’t mind sites tracking to know what products sell and what doesn’t, what browsers people use or how Long I spend on the site etc.

What I hate, is the fact that I go to agoda, I search for hotels in jiufen in taiwan, I look at only 2, I book one of the 2, I close it. Open up Facebook on my phone seconds later and have adverts saying: hey how about these 2 hotels in jiufen.

That shit annoys me. Stop following me and tracking what I’m doing and sharing it with all these companies. It makes me want to not use the internet...

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Re:Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS by goialoq on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @02:14PM (#16161255)

a footprint is not a fingerprint. This whole thread is about non-anonymous tracking.

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