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Re:Anti-fingerprinting extensions tend to make fingerprintin... by godelski on Thursday December 10, 2020 @03:26PM (#25378147)
How does this protect from nefarious actors? Shouldn't we (also) find ways to make fingerprinting impossible?
Re:Anti-fingerprinting extensions tend to make fingerprintin... by scrollaway on Thursday December 10, 2020 @03:45PM (#25378375)
Yes and no; it's still a cat and mouse game. You prevent one way, fingerprinters will find another way. And sometimes, the cure may be worse than the disease.

What also makes this a little different is that there's not many nefarious actors that truly benefit from fingerprinting random people. Fingerprinting is very useful in large scale operations, and it's hard to maintain a large scale web presence as an outlaw.

I fully agree that fingerprinting should be outlawed by privacy directives. But writing such a law correctly is really tough.

Re:Anti-fingerprinting extensions tend to make fingerprintin... by godelski on Thursday December 10, 2020 @04:55PM (#25379276)
Yeah I'm all for better privacy laws. Highly in favor actually. But this seems like the type of problem where you can't tackle from a single direction. I have to imagine there is a way to combat many of these tactics (at least enough to make them difficult) but I don't have the faintest clue of how to combat something like canvas fingerprinting which essentially is exploiting the silicon lottery.

I do not think laws go far enough because we live in a global society and laws don't exactly apply globally.

Re:Anti-fingerprinting extensions tend to make fingerprintin... by expect on Saturday December 12, 2020 @09:20PM (#25403751)
Not really. If this large scale operation is run by a government. And law is country-divided mostly.
Re:Anti-fingerprinting extensions tend to make fingerprintin... by tgsovlerkhgsel on Thursday December 10, 2020 @07:13PM (#25380639)
It's really hard to make it impossible for people to kill each other. That's why we put some protections in place where they make sense, but otherwise rely on making it illegal and punishing people who do it anyways.
Re:Anti-fingerprinting extensions tend to make fingerprintin... by doopy1 on Thursday December 10, 2020 @09:49PM (#25381694)
It's impossible to get rid of fingerprinting, better to punish when it's actually abused.