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A comment on Judge in Google case disturbed that 'incognito' users are tracked. Parent comment

Re:Judge in Google case disturbed that 'incognito' users are... by Daho0n on Friday February 26, 2021 @05:03PM (#26280393)
>Google doesn't fingerprint browsers like other adtech networks do

Citation needed :)

I'm taking part in the Browser Fingerprinting Project that was on here recently[1] and the only browser that isn't marked in the test as trackable so far is Firefox[2]. They don't use cookies for the test so third-party cookie sandboxing or blocking is irrelevant. If Google doesn't use browser fingerprinting as you say then they really should fix Chrome.

1: https://browser-fingerprint.cs.fau.de

2: I test most mainstream browsers as I already had them installed on Windows and Android devices for testing.

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Re:Judge in Google case disturbed that 'incognito' users are... by testesttest on Friday February 26, 2021 @07:13PM (#26281383)
Google definitely does browser fingerprinting. I have been running bots for years to collect pricing data. They check your gpu, bunch of stuff from navigator, etc. The only thing I have not seen them do is canvas fingerprinting.
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Re:Judge in Google case disturbed that 'incognito' users are... by IX-103 on Friday February 26, 2021 @08:30PM (#26281841)
They claim they do not use fingerprinting for user identification for advertising. Some people would say that this is a weaker claim than not using fingerprinting.

They have admitted to using those sorts of information for fraud detection to detect fake ad clicks, bulk account creation, or other malicious activity. I also suspect they do some clustering on this data to determine what accounts are related so if there is malicious behavior from a cluster of accounts that appear to be the same user they can act on the whole cluster.

But there is no evidence that they use fingerprinting for targeting advertising.

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Re:Judge in Google case disturbed that 'incognito' users are... by testesttest on Friday February 26, 2021 @09:22PM (#26282098)
Fair, I have no evidence they use fingerprinting info for advertising.

They definitely cluster fingerprints to block whole groups as does any decent antibot.

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Re:Judge in Google case disturbed that 'incognito' users are... by woofie11 on Saturday February 27, 2021 @04:57AM (#26283810)
They definitely do some form of fingerprinting for content optimization. After browsing in incognito, Youtube was sketchily on-topic.

(esoteric science/technical topics which wouldn't come up by chance)

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