Re:Identifying People by Their Browsing Histories
by Aeronwen on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:31AM
(#24332453)
Neither. They used a plugin to anonymously track people who opted-in to the experiment.
Re:Identifying People by Their Browsing Histories
by pflock on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:24AM
(#24332381)
Not sure about with Firefox's built in tracker protection. But I recall reading that having ad/tracker blocking could actually make a user easier to uniquely identify, because the browser now behaves differently than most: https://panopticlick.eff.org/about.
My hope would be that built-in tracker will make ad-blocking browser traffic more ubiquitous.
Re:Identifying People by Their Browsing Histories
by throwaway_pdp09 on Monday August 31, 2020 @01:15PM
(#24333595)
Pretty sure mine is highly distinctive for exactly that reason, no cookies + no JS, but if all you can tell from me is when I'm online, what useful info will that give you to sell me to advertisers. Nothing. I'm worthless. Track away.
Question: Was Mozilla replicating using a "vanilla" browser (e.g. no adblocking/tracker protection)? Or is this even after tracking mitigations are put into place? Mozilla's own Firefox now has built-in "tracker" protection in all versions of its browser, so it seems like they would be well-positioned to test whether the de-anonymization is thwarted with tracking protection toggled on or off.