Ask Slashdot: How Much of Your Online Browsing Can Advertisers See? 189
dryriver writes: We all know the phenomenon of browsing from an internet site A to a completely unrelated internet site B, and having identical ads follow you from site A to site B. Logic suggests that some kind of advertising system is following you from site A to B, and possibly onto subsequent sites C, D and E as well. Logic also suggests that this advertising system can now put together a nice long list of whatever you are looking at online. So here's the question: How much of your online browsing is "monitored" or "logged" this way by advertisers? Can there be any realistic expectation of privacy on the internet if the default behavior of advertisers is to track you as much as they can?
all (Score:5, Informative)
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Agreed, with most browser default settings,
Then, you can add privacy add-ons to your browser with the implied risk to make matters worse.
After that, worry about lower levels like the network etc. and your post was just as right as it can get.
reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: all (Score:2)
Adblockers and third party cookie blocking can help. Also avoid plugins like flash that caches data on your computer.
All of this we see was basically predicted in the Max Headroom tv series and in the novels by William Gibson - cyberpunk.
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Advertisers wish that could be true. Easiest way to know, dear submitter, create a throwaway account in Adsense or Facebook Ads and look for yourself is not a great deal, everything is aggregated. Fellow nerds like to think that you can pick individual people to advertise to, that might happen on Facebook, you can spam with ADs your friends but thats about it.
You are not an individual on the ad systems, you are part of a lot of groups of people based mostly on demographics, locations, and lastly, your brows
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Advertisers wish that could be true...
Yet, it may tend to be true depending on how big you are.
reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Advertisers wish that could be true...
Yet, it may tend to be true depending on how big you are.
reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
+1
It may be paranoia if you are too little to matter.
Al in all, the chances of being personally tracked increase by the more unique you try to be in your browsing habits. Should be common sense.
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Advertisers must think I'm an over 40 y/o single man. I get so many "Date 40+ year old women" ads.
I'm married, don't go on dating sites, and in my 30's. I wish I knew what made advertisers think I'm looking for older women. Makes me chuckle.
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You're mostly correct. You're also stating stuff that almost everybody on /. already knows.
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You're also stating stuff that almost everybody on /. already knows.
Am I? Do they? It does not look that way since every single time someone brings the topic the answers are long lists of comments dickwaving about who has the most blockers and ridiculous privacy set ups.
Most people in here act as if the ad networks target them specifically or personally as if this demographic was worth the effort. Millenials on the other hand... see Snapchat.
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haha good one AC!
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I read about the MAC tracking in the story about the garbage cans in London. https://www.howtogeek.com/1969... [howtogeek.com]
How about IP address?. How about screen size and density? How about GPU fingerprint? Your adblocker and script blocker combination is enough to identify you. Also, you know most adblockers (looking at you ghostery) aggregate the user behavior data? how do you know what they do with that behind doors.
Please share with us the host list for all the tracking servers active and the ones popping every day
They use tracking IDs. (Score:5, Informative)
Advertising content puts tracking cookies in your browser. Due to how cookies work, they are associated with the advertiser, not the website you're looking at. This means that the advertiser will see the *same* tracking ID whenever their content appears regardless of the site they're advertising on. Since they know what sites they're advertising on, they can match that with the tracking ID they've dropped on you to assemble a history of what sites you're browsing through. Including giving you the same ads.
This is the "forgotten" reason why people run ad-blockers: to nix the tracking data across websites!
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It's not just cookies. Etags also, and those leave nothing behind that you can see.
Re:They use tracking IDs. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank you. I initially thought you were mistaken, cause I'm familiar with ETags, but I hadn't thought it all the way through. Those are some sneaky buggers.
FWIW for others, ETags are optional, and generated server side per resource. They are used to determine if an item you have cached needs refreshed (if the etag you have differs, you need the updated version). That happens to be done server side... if you already have a resource, you send an HTTP request to the server, and your request headers include "If-None-Match", which has the ETag. If you send an ETag to the advertising server, they can misuse that feature and just send you back the same tag... this is how they end up tracking you (or part of it), as they can associate a unique ID with you because you always send them that same ETag.
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PrivacyBadger is great for handling that kind of tracking. It works by looking for third party sites that seem to be common to multiple websites you visit, and are thus able to track you as you move between them. It can then either block just cookies (allowing stuff like content to load) or it can block them entirely.
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Malware is an important reason, but for me, tracking is the #1 reason. The #2 reason is because so much of the web is functionally unusable if you aren't blocking ads.
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All this assumes the ad service tracks you via cookies or some similar trick.
What if the ad sites are being told by the site you visit that you are visiting, and they make an educated guess as to the kinds of ads to run? Worse, what if they are told the subsections or pages you visit, and thus narrow down your advertising interests?
CNN runs stories (and not in sponsored links) to things like a new heart pill. Do they report your IP address may have a person interested in heart medicine to advertisers? Do
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What if the ad sites are being told by the site you visit that you are visiting, and they make an educated guess as to the kinds of ads to run?
I have exactly zero problems with that.
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If I can't see your site without JavaScript enabled then it was probably a steaming pile of shit anyway.
Privoxy no better than hosts (Score:2)
Now that the majority of web traffic is HTTPS, Privoxy isn't any better than a DNS-based blocker [privoxy.org] such as /etc/hosts or Pi-hole.
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Wow. Thank you for explaining this. I've recently switched to using the 'Brave' browser. One of the things it blocks and reports on is 'trackers'.
I never really understood what this meant, but now I see how insidious it all is. I'm glad I switched to Brave.
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This is the "forgotten" reason why people run ad-blockers: to nix the tracking data across websites!
This is the primary reason that I block all the advertising agencies that I can. I'm not allergic to seeing a reasonable number of respectful ads. However, I 100% don't want the tracking that advertising brings.
This is why all the industry efforts to make ads "acceptable" are worthless to me -- all of those plans think that tracking is not a problem.
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If you pay for VPN service, and so some research about the service ahead of time, you can theoretically not have your browser history sold.
three words: self destructing cookies (Score:2, Interesting)
Install the firefox self destructing cookies plugin. This is how cookies should work. Unless you whitelist the domain, its cookies are destroyed 10 seconds after you leave their page. Others go further with adblock, but just this with kill the tracking.
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I use Privacy Badger for this. Cookies can be 100% blocked, allowed but only for the session, or allowed to be stored for future sessions. What's more there's a central repository of knowledge about what settings are necessary in order for sites to work so you don't have to figure it out yourself.
Oh my, that's a lot default blocked entirely here on /.
Control Scripts and Cookies (Score:5, Insightful)
Want more privacy, absolutely do not run windows anal probe 10 because if you do, you have already lost. Next up run add ons to control your internet experience, the first up a script blocker to block scripts you do not like especially bad advertiser scripts add to that a cookie control add on to either block cookies from particular sites or make them session only and delete them when you leave.
I prefer to control what is allowed to run and what is blocked. So for advertisers, show me shit ads and you are blocked, just one shit ad advertising crap products or services and that also includes ending up at a bad site, those providing ads services to that bad site and you are done, from there on in. You behave yourself with those ads and fine, they might even be informative.
Google search is becoming nothing but google ads, it is starting to look very much like the old asta la vista and MSN, all you see is ads on first the screen, drop to the bottom and look the fucking arse holes have dumped all ads at the bottom, you now have to try to find the bit in between to see your actual search and the shit fucks did that on purpose to force you to read the ads. Google is just becoming more and more shite, from the YouTube advertiser friendly horse shit to google advertiser search bullshit. M$ would have a chance now with MSN search but they decide to be douche bags with Windows anal probe 10.
Why is it, that old tech companies must go down, to be replaced by new client respecting companies, whom then become douche bag corporatists and must again be replaced. Why the crazy stupid business style, is it an American thing, is that the norm for American business, start small and customer orientated become big and become customer abusive.
What instead of a Windows 10 laptop? (Score:2)
Want more privacy, absolutely do not run windows anal probe 10
Yet Windows 10 comes on the majority of laptops in U.S. showrooms. Staples and Best Buy have zero GNU/Linux laptops. So what's the alternative? MacBook? Chromebook? I don't see how a Chromebook is any better privacy-wise; it just has Google's tendrils in it instead of Microsoft's. Or ought everyone to research a Windows laptop's Linux compatibility, buy it, format it, and install Linux?
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Disable javascript except for sites you really, really, really, trust
What should the developer of a web application do to earn prospective users' trust? Or should the developers of a web application give up, develop a native app for each of six operating systems, and guide visitors to the developer's website to said native apps?
There are Linux InstallFests [whose participants] will spend a month of Sundays helping you install it yourself for $0.
I don't see that working so well on a laptop whose backlight brightness, suspend, audio, and WLAN are broken in some way in Linux (source [debian.org]). What should the owner of such a laptop do?
The "unstated" goal is to make MS-Office a hassle to use, so people will just use libreoffice instead.
I don't see how that's practical in the industry that my day job is i
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Why is it, that old tech companies must go down, to be replaced by new client respecting companies, whom then become douche bag corporatists and must again be replaced.
Because they start out losing vast amounts of money by not having ads or monetizing your data, and then realize that they need to show a profit one day and go bad. Then some startup does the same thing and the cycle repeats.
By the way, blocking all third party Javascript (except for a few whitelists for common libraries) is pretty effective.
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I'm not getting any ads from running Windows, and whatever "super duper" private information you think Microsoft is collection [sic] they can have because I'm still not seeing ads.
No ads? That's amazing, tell us how you do it. There is no "thinking" that Microsoft are collecting data about you via Windows 10, it is a fact. Whether you care or not is up to you.
Linux sucks and will never be mainstream.
The post you are replying to never mentioned Linux. Isn't this going off-topic anyway?
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absolutely do not run windows anal probe 10
I'm not getting any ads from running Windows [...] Linux sucks and will never be mainstream.
The post you are replying to never mentioned Linux.
You are technically correct. But when rtb61 wrote "Absolutely do not run Windows 10", and you think rtb61 didn't have Linux in mind, which of the following replacements for Windows 10 do you think rtb61 had in mind for production use?
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when rtb61 wrote "Absolutely do not run Windows 10", and you think rtb61 didn't have Linux in mind, which of the following replacements for Windows 10 do you think rtb61 had in mind for production use?
I have no idea what rtb61 had in mind; I am not him. But if you like Windows go with 7 or 8.1 FTTB and see what developments there have been as they approach those end dates. 28 months or more is a long time in this business and you never know - Microsoft may have been ordered to stop spying by then. I'm using Win7 for games and scam baiting myself.
Windows Home has no downgrade rights (Score:2)
But if you like Windows go with 7 or 8.1 [for the time being] and see what developments there have been as they approach those end dates.
Which raises the question of where to get a Windows 7 license for a newly purchased PC that came with Windows 10 Home. Windows Home has no downgrade rights according to this table [dell.com]. Would you recommend that everybody who buys a new PC with Windows spring for the Pro upgrade just for the downgrade rights?
a nice long list of whatever you are looking at (Score:4, Funny)
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Is the 2% when we actually click the link to RTF article?
Answer your own question, /. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Additionally there are non-user facing network infrastructures that can track you -- akamai, limewire, etc. Akamai in particular has software all over the internet that is VERY good at gleaning information from network traffic.
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slashdotmedia.com doesn't seem to be necessary. I'm getting by with just slashdot.org and fsdn.com
extreme measures (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless you take extreme measures, which only a small minority do, they can see all of it, or so near as not to matter.
The measures you must take increasingly break web sites, because we the public have trained the sites that it is acceptable to require privacy invading features for basic functionality. The more sites are broken in this way, the less people are willing to take the measures that might cause them a tiny bit of inconvenience, and so the cycle continues.
The only way for this to be avoided was i
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The measures you must take increasingly break web sites
This doesn't happen as much as it used to, in my experience. But if my countermeasures make a website nonfunctional, I simply don't use that website.
There are only three sites that I can think of that are actually essential to me, and none of them break because of my countermeasures.
the seven-fingered man (Score:2)
I'm only tracked by the large number of privacy-guard and productivity extensions installed into Firefox running under a fringe open source OS. I've checked before, it's a highly unique fingerprint.
Yeah, so I'm sure there are some companies out there tracking me as the man with seven middle fingers, all extended in the direction of the company tracking me.
Thus, I only ever see advertising for the Armsel Striker [wikipedia.org].
Haha. Just kidding. Though I might actually click through if they did take a hint.
Bypass referrals? (Score:1)
You pick up a web beacon, everywhere you go. (Score:2)
or a 1 pixel x 1 pixel gif https://www.monster.com/career... [monster.com]
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Very bad link, use this if wish to know of beacons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Ha Ha - This. At one financial web site I use (with NoScript and Privacy Badger tuned to let it run without too many other things working), down in the lower left corner, is a single-pixel graphic somebody dropped there, which is fully ADA compliant - has a label saying "single-pixel graphic".
Normally they are transparent and why the GIF format is used, in the begining (of WWW) GIF was one the few formats that allowed it.
I'm confused (Score:2)
When was there an expectation of privacy in the internet?
If you visit Site A, Site A has your browsing history of Site A. They're free to share that information with who ever they please.
When you visit Site B, they're free to share it all too.
If Site A and Site B both share that information with Adverting Network A, then Advertising Network A has your browsing history of Site A and Site B
It's like rocket science, only not quite.
More like brain surgery.
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In theory, Site A and Site B don't know that you're the same person. Advertiser tracking cookies and ETags bridge that gap in a way people did not expect. I don't think that many people would expect Pornhub to know their Facebook profile.
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Who visits pornhub without incognito mode? (don't forget to close the browser first, or ETag's can leak in to the incognito session)
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It doesn't allow access to your regular set of cookies and starts with a clean slate so you only get cookie-tracked in the single session.
It's supposed to not use your regular cache too, so ETags don't leak but Chrome has a bug where you need to close the browser first.
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If you're behind an IP address for a residential ISP, chances are everyone from IP address at the same time are in the same house.
If any browser is tracked at the IP address for a period of time, all devices from that IP over that time period are also probably in the same house.
If you leak any cookies/etags between a TOR session and a non-TOR session, the two can be linked as well.
Browser fingerprinting is a lot more approximate than cookies. According to amiunique.org, I'm unique over their 400,000 fingerp
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If you visit Site A, Site A has your browsing history of Site A. They're free to share that information with who ever they please.
That's a big part of the problem, right there. They shouldn't be free to share that information with whoever they please.
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Why not? Nobody is forcing you to visit their website. They're paying for the content, servers and bandwidth. Are you paying for the service?
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Why not?
Because (and I recognize that people have different perspectives on this) the data about me is mine, not the site's.
Are you paying for the service?
Depends on the site. There are several that I pay for, yes.
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and the data about their site is not theirs?
If you paid for a service, there should be an agreement as to what you've paid for. That's bound to include how any data is used.
Quite a bit actually... (Score:2)
It's not just tied to a single machine either (Score:1)
I watch Netflix exclusively on my PS3 and yet Pornhub shows me ads on my laptop based on what I watched on my PS3. I'm not logged into my Netflix account on my laptop. In fact, the only account that's shared between the two is Amazon. Netflix must be sharing my viewing habits [readwrite.com] by IP address to an advertiser who has a relationship with Pornhub. Does that strike anyone as unexpected and creepy?
This leaves only a couple options for privacy on the Internet:
1. Use TOR to do all your browsing.
2. Demand regulations
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The best one is though, I have a couple shirts on that redbubble site (sly link drop https://www.redbubble.com/peop... [redbubble.com]) and it keeps advertising my own designs back to me.
I don't care (Score:1)
Does it matter? (Score:2)
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more often than not they advertise stuff to either after you've bought it or decided you don't want it
Better still (or worse, depending on how you see it) they advertise stuff you are selling yourself, and you have looked at ads for it to see what prices your rivals are selling it for.
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List of secure browsers and plug-in (Score:2)
This article [techworld.com] has brief descriptions of six secure browsers and a secure plug-in. The article is pretty recent (August 1, 2007). The browsers and plug-in are
Epic Privacy Browser
Comodo Dragon/Ice Dragon
Brave
Tor
Dooble
HTTPS Everywhere (plug-in)
Yandex Browser
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Sorry, I meant to say 2017, not 2007!
Defcon (Score:2)
Can there be any realistic expectation of privacy? (Score:2)
Does anybody still watch ads? (Score:2)
Seriously, don't we all have adblocking software installed by now? I haven't seen an ad in years - because I do not want to run the risk of infection through malware ads, because I do not care to be tracked, because I don't want to spend the resources to download them and render them, because they draw my attention to things I don't care about in the first place, and finally... because I can.
Ads could have been an acceptable form of commercialisation on the internet. It's entirely on the companies that load
With the amount they have to watch, (Score:1)
Google alone has presence on 85%+ of top domains (Score:1)
Shameless self-promotion of my master's thesis on third-party tracking [joelpurra.com] follows; see full PDF [joelpurra.com] for numbers backing up claims. A paper based on the thesis also got published by IEEE [joelpurra.com].
I'm uncomfortable being "monitored" and "logged" -- but worry less about visible advertisements, and more about either hidden web beacons or visible (but desirable) content served by known tracker organizations. Adblockers can block most visible ads, and you'll notice if one slips through -- but fewer care about less blinky-flas
It depends (Score:2)
It depends on how strong your countermeasures are. But it's a safe bet that, even with very strong defenses, some advertisers will see some of it.
Yeah, no. (Score:2)
"We all know the phenomenon of browsing from an internet site A to a completely unrelated internet site B, and having identical ads follow you from site A to site B."
Yeah, uh...no. We don't. I've never experienced this, because I've been running some variety of ad blocker for the past...14 years. Not to mention protecting myself from tracking cookies for the last 10.
This type of user behaviour monitoring is unacceptable. I can't fathom how any user could ever go on the web without protection against it.
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Advertisers are idiots.
I go on line and search for something. I find a good deal and buy it. NOW they start popping up ads for that thing*.
*A specialty tool for fixing my car. It's likely I will never need another.
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you might return it and buy a similar item
your friend might want one too and the ad reminds you to tell him you just bought one and it was an awesome product
you might break the one you bought and need another
you buying one makes you more valuable to advertise the same item to then someone who didn't
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the ad reminds you to tell him you just bought one and it was an awesome product
If I see an obviously targeted ad, it reminds me to never buy products from that company again. I certainly won't be recommending it, even if it's the best thing ever.
And you are... (Score:2)
...The average user as far as demographics go?
Most of us bothering to /. are seen as statistical noise.
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Nope, I'm not, and I never claimed to be.
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But I always consider that a good thing. They fixed on something I was interested in at least once, then used that instead of poking ads for other things in my face all the time. After that times out or whatever, they eventually default back to advertising dating sites for asian chicks... my internet profile must make me look lonely or something.
Re:Don't care (Score:5, Interesting)
I change my online identity on a regular basis. That's the best strategy. They can keep terabytes of tracking logs about jdoe411 if that amuses them, when I switch to redsoxfan4life it's going to be a blank slate. The first few times that I did that I was mostly annoyed by the bookmarks I was losing, but I long stopped copying them over. The fresh start is always great.
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Yes, but there is research showing that browsing habits are a good enough fingerprint to identify people. It is hard to change your browsing habits, hence the name, "habit".
Annual Identity Changes (Score:1)
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Usually at all time I have a pair of email accounts: one from outlook.com or gmail, and one from some random provider like gmx or yandex. I setup a redirect from one to the other so I only have to monitor one. For online services I use the first one; with friends and such I use the 2nd account.
Outlook.com is fairly buggy; for instance password reset emails sent to @outlook.com often don't show up (not even in spam), although if automatic mail forwarding is enabled they mysteriously show up in the destinatio
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They often have your IP geolocatable to your house, or at least the neighborhood. That's how they always manage to have sexy singles available to chat in your tiny-ass town.
That's funny, because they seem to think I live in a place that is actually 200 miles from here. I have not corrected them. Also I get notified, with nice pictures, of lonely sex-starved MILFs who live "Only 400 away". 400 yards? 400 miles? Must be miles because no-one lives with 400 yards of me except an old farmer.
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Also I get notified, with nice pictures, of lonely sex-starved MILFs who live "Only 400 away". 400 yards? 400 miles? Must be miles because no-one lives with 400 yards of me except an old farmer.
What you don't know is your old farmer neighbor is a pervert with a basement stocked with women.
Re: Don't care (Score:2)
A mile away when it's 10 miles to the next house.
Re:Don't care (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to use all that crap until I found out about PiHole. Now I just have my networks clients use it for the primary name server. The DNS requests to the ad servers never make it out of my network, so they never see any requests from me. For the few things that do make it through, uBlock Origin gets those until the PiHole lists get updated. It's also pretty damned effective at eliminating telemetry data from making it outside the network.
Now, PiHole is basically just a glorified hosts file, but it allows me to handle things for the entire network instead of a device by device basis, as well as protecting those devices where I can't get at a hosts file (ie, mobiles)
Of course, this doesn't do anything about websites that set cookies and share their own data with advertisers, but there are other tools for dealing with that.
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The major limitation of PiHole, and hosts lists in general, is that they can't re-write HTML on the fly like uBlock can. All they can do is block certain domains, they can't do pattern matching or collapse the holes where the advertising used to be.
PrivacyBadger has a big advantage over hosts files too - it does real-time analysis and automatically blocks sites that appear to be tracking you, without the need for someone to manually check and update a hosts file.
Hosts is becoming ineffective anyway as adver
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Thanks for the kind words.
For Chrome I recommend:
PrivacyBadger
uBlock Origin
uBlock Origin Extra
CanvasFingerprintBlock
Disable WebGL
Vanilla Cookie Manager (if you want to manually manage cookie permissions)
Canvas fingerprinting is something that doesn't get enough attention. Basically they can identify your browser by rendering to a hidden HTML canvas element. WebGL can be used in a similar way to tack you, so best to disable it and just whitelist the tiny number of sites that have a legitimate use for it.
For
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Drakonblayde is right - PiHole is excellent. It can run on any Debian system (not just on a Raspberry Pi), and Red Hat/Fedora too (though I use Debian).
https://pi-hole.net/
The devs have a great attitude. I donated to further their cause. Maybe you will too, once you try it.
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I'm using a customized hosts file and use an ad-blocker. If some ad company still finds it's way I'll just block it. If an ad finds its way to my inbox I'll flag and report it as spam. Gmail has always been very good at that. Bottom line is that ad companies can track me all day long but they wont get anything out of it besides being blocked further.
Ah, the irony! All of your email goes through the world's largest advertising company. They get plenty out of it.
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Non sequitur much? Did you reply to the wrong post?
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Everytime you block something, they've accomplished their mission - getting it before your eyes... - they only need to win once.
If they only need once why do they keep showing the same advert on TV for months or years? Eg everyone in the UK must have seen a certain particularly annoying advert for insurance over a thousand times. If you are right they could have saved themselves a lot of money by showing it just for a few days, say.
And what have they achived by getting it before my eyes? I am more likely to be pissed off by it, the more so the more intrusive it is. There are certain brands I make a point of not buying because th
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they only need to win once.
Not if they want the ad to actually work. The standard rule of thumb is that you have to be exposed to an ad about seven times before it affects behavior enough to matter.
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My Windows setup also requires no interaction because block lists are automatically updated through Chrome,
Wow, you are secure! Windows and Chrome.
Re: Don't care (Score:2)
Apk is a spammer anyway.
The alternative to blocking ads is to click them every time because each click costs the advertiser a certain amount.
Ad clicking bots...
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But seriously, I would use a plugin that clicked ads in the background. I would pledge bandwidth and join a botnet that spent all day long clicking on every random ad on the internet. Someone needs to make this a real thing.
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First, people are a little too paranoid.
How so?
unless you actually visit the site (and provide private information like a name), the advertiser doesn't get that sales lead.
That's not relevant. Whether or not a sales lead is generated has no impact on these issues.
Your IP address is not what is used for this, the cookie is, and that cookie is married to the ad network.
That's right (especially if you expand the definition of "cookie" to include their stronger forms). I'm pretty sure that most people here understand that.
Why does that make the situation more acceptable?
nothing can be hidden in them that you can't decode. You can also erase them incredibly easy.
They usually just contain some sort of tracking ID, so you can see them -- but they're meaningless to you.
Erasing them is easy. Getting rid of them is hard, when you take into account supercookies and beacons.
Unless you are doing criminal activity, eg pirating movies, you should not be concerned by the average ad, because a lot of the individual data isn't stored, only aggregate data on a much macro level.
I