184
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
184 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
59689 readers
1934 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
If I'm understanding that correctly, that would give ~14.6 million unique fingerprints just based on your browser. That's a lot, but also tiny compared to the billions of Meta users. I'm a little skeptical that they would be able to determine a user is from the EU without using IP or cookies.
Edit: If they block users who's fingerprint matches an EU user, and their IP comes from a known VPN service, then they could likely get pretty good accuracy. I wonder if there are any North Americans getting blocked while using a VPN.
Dont take this the wrong way, but this data is from 2010. It is 13 years old. The iPhone came out in 2007. Android in 2008. The internet and tracking advanced MASSIVELY since then. Google announced in 2020 that they no longer will support 3d party cookies in their own Chrome Browser. You can be sure, that they have advanced their system to a equally/more advanced system that they were doing this step. Allegedly based on advanced Fingerprints. And yes, an IP is still one parameter in tracking. But its not the only datapoint anymore since many years.
There's only so much information you can get with hardware though. No doubt the software in tracking fingerprints, and matching similar ones has become very sophisticated. However, I wouldn't be surprised if device fingerprints hasnt increased in diversity much.
On the other hand, maybe they're using a spectre/meltdown attack to get a MAC address or something. In that case, we're fucked.