ok so it’s not a perfect solution. so?

name a language that websites are written in that has less than a million users

the problem is that even if you convince 5 million people to join your union and raise your wages, the other 295 million people in the country are then gonna take the opportunity to undercut you, which leads you to be fired as “too expensive” and other people to take your job.

yeah i’ve made the same experience. they don’t seem to actually store the fingerprint across each site visit? or they do but it changes continuously. in which case, good job firefox ❤️

actually, what i’ve learned is that some people (probably the majority?) actually like being shown ads. that is, i believe, because many people have no inherent purpose of life. so they need to be told why they exist by someone else (“you must consume” is the message of ads. it gives people a purpose in life).

I also pointed out that this was highly unethical because it’s using physiological data to manipulate someone into spending money. Indiscriminately.

I said What about people with a shopping addiction.? Or kids using their parents credit cards. And you would be using this data to psychologically manipulate people for purchases but the data could be used in all sorts of other ways that really even more unethical.

marketing is highly unethical in general. however, your points are kinda invalid. sure, children can use their parents’ credit cards, but they can also burn the money with a lighter. children can do stupid things, and ideally such a purchase would be illegal and the parents eligible for a refund. or you would need a password to authenticate etc.

however what is a real problem is that advertisement poisons our environment. when you step out on the street, there’s ads everywhere. you can’t go anywhere where there’s no ads. the consequence is that your head is trapped in an eternal cobweb of “consume, consume, consume”. you must consume, there is nothing else to do. that is the true horror that modern marketing has brought to us. psychologically hacking the brain to make us think about buying stuff all the time.

yeah that can all happen browser-side easily

i agree with everything besides “it’s our job to …”

yeah but now the website knows i speak english. that does not personally identify me. there are 5 billion people speaking english

ok nvm it’s 1.5 billion, still a lot.

i think the word “engineer” has something to do with the word “ingenuity” … now ask yourself, how much creative thinking do you need as a coder?

you wouldn’t download a pepperoni pizza

a woman who knows how to use her power

yes i know. sadly a lot of big scrappers don’t do that, instead they scrap the web interface. which is significantly inefficient so it slows down the service for everyone else.

that checks out

wtf. why does my browser send such an uniquely identifying token. wtf

(there’s more to the right of it, i cut it to preserve privacy)

WTF

TIL. the way trackers can do stuff

yeah i get your point but that’s not what i meant. i’m using VPNs to do google searches, for example, in incognito browsing tab. so google knows the 10k searches i did, but it cannot connect them to each other, as session cookies between them are deleted each time i close the browser (which is about every few minutes). and i don’t log in to any account in the incognito tab either, so it can’t use account identities as fixed points either. and it cannot associate the queries by IP address either.

edit:

after seeing this website … https://amiunique.org/fingerprint i get what you mean now. i have to think about this.

hmm i’m not entirely sure either but it seems like fediverse content should be easily archivable.

probably this is another engineering challenge to think about once that i have checks notes a few months of free time …

?

it helps to clarify one’s mind from time to time :)

a lot of lemmy servers use anubis to hinder bots. it’s quite effective actually. makes the bots do some hard cryptographic riddles before accessing data. insignificant for human users who only read 100 posts but significant for bots who want to read millions of posts.