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I'm pretty sure apple paid to be omitted here. They absolutely track you despite lying and saying they don't.
Yep, researchers showed that changing the privacy buttons on apple stuff did nothing to alter data traffic sent to apple.
So the corporations that make their money on mass surveillance are still spying on people?
I'm shocked, shocked!
Well not that shocked.
But I am hungry
Yeah...but at least the Chinese don't get the data?...(Sarcasm)
Super Ultra Mega Surprised
Yeah all know they’re dishonest and will do it anyway.
I run all my stuff in a private tab nowadays. And nuke all cookies etc each session.
Also, make sure I have anti-fingerprinting enabled.
With a VPN.
The only annoying thing is I get a few texts/emails saying "A new device just accessed your account. Was it you?". Yes, yes it was. And I'm not relying on a cookie or fingerprinting for security.
Stitching is the concept of updating your profile by appending your interactions from private sessions when you approve that "Yes, it was you" accessing your account "from a new device", or when it's otherwise possible to associate your current session with previous ones in any way.
One of the most overlooked, underused, and still hasn't seen production release privacy settings is the ability to partition, or not decorate visited links.
In Firefox based in about:config
layout.css.visited_links_enabled
false
In chromium based in chrome://flags
Partition the Visited Link Database, including 'self-links'
Enabled
so search engines like google can't see what sites you've visited anymore. genius, never occurred to me that they could track that. thanks for the tip
but did you disable the lesser known tab history (firefox)? Hamburger menu >> History
Private tabs do nothing for the backend, your ISP, browser, search engine, and any sites you visit, can still see everything you do. All private tabs do is they don't save history or cookies on your frontend.
VPN hides your data from your ISP, but there are still workarounds. Multi-hop can make you harder to triangulate though.
You still need to use a privacy-centric browser and search engine or else the ones you use can still send information about you back to their servers where they can build a profile on you. They won't have your real IP address as long as you never connect without a VPN, but any little data they collect on you can be collated with the rest to profile you and potentially identify you.
Even with browsers like firefox or waterfox, you still need to enable all of the security settings or else there are gaps that can be exploited. HTTPS-only mode, DNS over HTTPS, anti-tracking extensions, etc...
Even then, I wouldn't be surprised if there's an unseen gap somewhere. But it's a lot better than using google and microsoft and no vpn.
You still need to use a privacy-centric browser
Check out Konform Browser. Least leaky one out there.
Also, browsers still send so much unique data that they can be reasonably well fingerprinted. I don't really know all the things, but you can combine info such as OS, browser version, window size, list of extensions, HTTP request headers, timezone, etc...
Plus you could also track behavior.
And even with VPN some analysis might be able to figure out what you're looking at based on traffic patterns.
We need a browser extension that will add or remove a random number of dummy browser extensions per session to further obfuscate the fingerprinting
https://amiunique.org/ shows you many of the things they can check for
Holy shit, that's a lot of data. I had no idea they could see what language packs I have installed on my keyboard. I have a pretty unique combination of languages, so that probably makes me really easy to identify across platforms.
Is there an easy way to disable or block fingerprinting?
Some VPN providers offer a setting that makes it harder to analyze traffic patterns. They make every packet the same size and send them at regular intervals along with extra noise. It makes everything look uniform so that AI can't match your traffic to/from the VPN server with traffic between the VPN server and your web activity.
It might be overkill, and it adds latency and uses extra data. But for maximum paranoia, it's an option
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
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privacy
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