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Google Chrome’s plan to limit ad blocking extensions kicks off next week
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That isn’t necessarily going to be possible. There are many diverse fingerprinting techniques, I really don’t think it would be trivial to spoof them all. User agent is easy but stuff like TLS fingerprinting is much harder to spoof.
If we get to the point where the corporatocracy can force us into a limited set of compliant browsers then the web as we know it has ended. I don’t think they’ll go that far unless they decide to go whole hog. That level of control will likely look to wipe out any useful plugins like ad-blockers or other privacy features. I didn’t want to go down the slippery slope argument, but that’s pretty much what will happen if they go that direction.
We’re kind of already there - there’s Chromium, Webkit and Gecko and that’s about it, two of which are controlled by the biggest ad companies in the world, and the third is heavily subsidised by the first. Mozilla was effectively forced into implementing DRM into the browser already, and there’s plenty of other “””standards””” published and approved by Google that Mozilla is pressured into implementing but doesn’t want to for security and privacy reasons.
I definitely expect it’ll get worse.