Re:Join a browser fingerprinting study
by asdfjklk234 on Friday February 05, 2021 @11:26PM
(#26044118)
Those 1px GIFs were so that some server other than the one you are currently interacting with can track you. So if I go to nytimes.com I might get served a 1px GIF from BigAdTechCorp.com. The proposal is that all images, text, and data only come from the server you are currently pointing your browser at. So if you go to nytimes.com then only nytimes.com can send you text and images, only the nytimes.com server sees what content you request and when you request it. Once upon a time people purchased printed newspapers and magazines and there weren't all the invasive ways to spy on how long readers engaged with articles and images in said periodicals and yet we all managed. Marketing firms made ad buys all the same with this old tech and many successful ad campaigns happened, all without the invasive tracking.
The first forms of user tracking involved 1px GIFs that existed purely so that the server could log the request. If you allow any code execution at all, then the client can send data back to the server by asking for data from the server. Reads are just bidirectional writes.