this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
35 points (90.7% liked)

Privacy

31934 readers
712 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Does any of you know firsthand how the ad industry works? I hate them with all my heart and I already go out of my way to block them but maybe you have been on the other side of the fence and can share some internal insight on what to focus on to really disrupt the data collection. I.e. even if I use uBlock can the ad network still build a profile? Is the benefit only cosmetic on my end? I also run a local AdGuard instance on my network

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] catfooddispenser@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Some people seem to think that blending in is the best/only strategy to avoid being tracked and profiled. The developer of GrapheneOS advocates for this in no uncertain terms, encouraging users of his Vanadium web browser not to use uBlock or NoScript, yet also claims that DNS-level blocking is the only way to block content without sticking out like a sore thumb. I personally question his assumptions regarding this. All it would take for a big ad broker like Google, Amazon, Baidu to detect this would be for them to analyze their web server logfiles to spot which distinct clients (IP addr. x date x time x User-Agent string x other fingerprints) connect to their front-ends but don't connect to the analytics or ad-network servers during the same page-loading time frame.

One might also wonder whether ad brokers put deals in place with their customers to get read access to these customer's web server logfiles to do the same kind of analysis in exchange for cheaper rates. Or perhaps under the guise of "let us offload you of these complicated analytics tasks, just show us your logfiles and we'll take it from there."

[–] Loucypher@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

I can understand the logic but… the web is a horrible place with no adblockers

[–] Loucypher@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

My threat level aim at reducing passive analytics, not active ones