Maybe we could break this into categories of knowledge:
* A user identity on any particular site, and the personally identifying information (PII) attached to it (email, phone, IP addresses used)
* A wider identity profile that can be stitched together via site user identities and browser fingerprinting
* The topical interests of an identity
It'd posit that to break tracking you'd have to disguise the first two by randomizing PII and browser fingerprint. Randomizing the third is more about making the collected data on personal interests useless regardless of identity, thus decreasing the value proposition of invasive advertising.
Tackling this from a technical level, to me, at this point seems infeasible. Feel free to inbox my email if you have any more thoughts about this, this is something that is difficult to discuss in such public forums.
I will just leave this - to me, people place undue faith in adblockers and extensions. That fixes only a part of the problem. You're also placing a lot of trust in your browser (not to mention the extension). If I really, truly want to determine who you are - from the perspective of a data miner - I can trivially hide all backend requests behind a proxy that you will never know about, and your adblocker will never know about. It provides a false sense of security that a lot of otherwise technical people hide behind.
For example, faking traffic jam data for google maps with phones. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-04/man-creates-fake-traf...
Faking wifi and location data to unlock airpods pro in India. https://www.reddit.com/r/AirpodsPro/comments/1gqscig/two_guy...
DataPools is a Wi-Fi geolocation spoofing project that virtually relocates your phone to the latitudes and longitudes of Silicon Valley’s elite pools. https://adam.harvey.studio/datapools/
These are just a couple of fun examples, obviously you could augment these with LLM/DL tools and other anti-censorship (mixer, DCnets etc ), bot(nets) tools to create multiple identities that post in other languages, create fake photos of your in various countries, to make it hard to follow.
I'm aware that "national security" is often invoked in these types of discussions, and a little aware more than I think the general populace at how valuable some of this data is to intelligence operations. However, I would counter that by saying perhaps someone should consider whether it's a problem that such "critical" national security functions belong in the hands of companies that control the flow of such data for profit to anyone with a pocketbook, and ponder whether this is actually working to cause net help or harm for national security. I would argue strongly the latter, to the profitability of the people that control such data and contribute a lot of money to the elections of people that put forth their agendas, but this isn't the place to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/06/15/using_snarks.htm...
Obviously this requires companies to embrace said technologies.
That is hilarious and should be expanded.