Comment on Germany’s CDU Pushes Real-Name Social Media Mandate and ID Checks
greyscale@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week agoIn the bad old days where I was forced to make spyware in exchange for a white collar paycheque, we used to make things called “supercookies” that used basically any fingerprint, storage, glitches of a browser to store a token or otherwise identify you with or without identity
We had something like 98% confidence even if you had no cookies, based on just using JS to eyeball your browser and probing it.
Not saying its a “supercookie” but the internet is funny like that. The current bleeding edge of it seems to be abusing favicon caches
hector@lemmy.today 1 week ago
Thanks for the reply. I have heard of these. After 1/6 I was going to sign up for Gab or one of those right wing social medias that was popular to see what they were saying and sharing, and on the sign in they demanded I authorize “permanent cookies,” which I refused to do. Reading about them everyone else called them persistent cookies.
But after this incident I checked the cookies and firefox doesn’t show any of these persistent cookies, I don’t know how one would even find them and remove them if they don’t show up.
I also am chagrined that PC’s don’t protect you from this. Like you should have to explicitly agree to such a thing, and be given tools to see what is on there, and remove them as you see fit. Just one more step into not owning our own electronics and just using it at the permission of the manufacturers and whomever else.
But reddit never did that to me before. Why would it log me in without telling me? It’s still quite odd there has to be a reason, and it almost has to be a hacker or something I would think. As fantastical as that sounds.
greyscale@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Its not about permissions, its about giving you the occular patdown and making observations.
I don’t need to know who you are, but that you’re unique and heres how I tell you are you.
I can later relate that back to PII if I’m clever.
I hated working in the marketing/tracking space.
hector@lemmy.today 1 week ago
So it’s as much about recognizing browswer signatures, unique identifiers, etc, as it is putting persistent cookies on computers? I have read about some of those things, but have previously tried and failed to find these persisent cookies and remove them, and gave up. The computers are set up in a way to allow these groups to infect your computer with impunity.
Everything is, which is why we need consumers’ unions. Turns out it is as much the fault of the government as with the companies themselves, they want to be able to spy on you, but in the process make us vulnerable to everyone else. The NSA is supposed to be protecting us from hackers, from criminal groups, foreign intelligence agencies, contractors for the rich, etc., but has made us vulnerable to them, in a way that regular people have no tools to even spot let alone fix, so they can see what we are doing. They have their priorities all screwed up.
Given that the government does an end run around constitutional protections like the bill of rights by letting private companies spy on us and then buying the data from them, a ridiculous argument but one endorsed by our captured courts long past, it makes sense that they would’ve influenced manufacturers and software companies to do a lot of things, like not allowing you to take your battery out of your device so you can’t stop the gps and whatever else is spying on you without a faraday cage; like making windows task manager useless to shut down malign activity, where once is was a powerful tool, the only tool many users had any idea how to use, to override malign forces on your computer and even remove them; and allowing computers to be infected with persistent cookies and the like, without telling you or needing permission, with no seeming way of knowing what is on there, let alone being able to remove it. To name just a few.
I truly believe we all need to move to open source, as soon as I’m confident I can make the change safely and have my devices still work I plan on doing it. It only gets worse from here on out, at least with open source we have people on our side, on the side of privacy and security, working to keep bad actors out, something we no longer have at all in proprietary software like microsoft.
greyscale@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Yeah we used to do things like messing with your history, messing with local storage, messing with your browser cache, messing around with flash and other exploitable plugins.
I can make you download a specific favicon and ID you that way.
Also, most peoples browsers are actually quite unique in terms of fingerprint. My browser, for example, is unique among the 4.8M fingerprints in their database.