Re:A comprehensive study of how fingerprintable users are
by stackghost on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @09:21PM
(#50449071)
> The good answer to your dilemma is x402: https://x402.org/ Nothing in life is free; you've been paying with your attention via ads, which is where the urge to fingerprint comes from (targeting). Agentic AI is rapidly killing web ads as a revenue source. It's time to stop kicking the can on micropayments.
Never gonna happen. Why would I pay to access content before I can even determine if the content is worth paying for? And if you let me see the content before I pay, what’s my incentive for paying at all?
Micropayments as a concept is predicated upon the idea that people are producing content worth paying for.
The inconvenient truth is that the vast majority of the pre-LLM web was not worth paying a single cent for, and the problem is even worse today.
Scrapers and bots put a ton of effort into anti-fingerprinting. Ordinary users? Zero.
Users care mainly about cross-site fingerprinting. Bot-fighting is concerned with single-site fingerprinting.
The good answer to your dilemma is x402: https://x402.org/ Nothing in life is free; you've been paying with your attention via ads, which is where the urge to fingerprint comes from (targeting). Agentic AI is rapidly killing web ads as a revenue source. It's time to stop kicking the can on micropayments.
Also, this article commits the common mistake of assuming that privacy means hiding in the largest possible cohort. That's bogus. You can also get privacy by belonging to many one-member cohorts -- i.e. fingerprint uniquely but differently to each site you visit and differently to a single site over longer timespans (like weeks). This is precisely what Brave's "farbling" does; farbled users have very unique fingerprints and yet they can't be tracked.