I was recently web searching for the EFF tool that checks how unique your fingerprint is. During that search, I stumbled upon the URL linked below. It was such a weird experience to see all the things that privacy advocates, like people in this community, complain / warn about from the other side of the aisle: How do you prevent people from exerting their right to privacy because you have dollar signs tattooed into your eyeballs. Gave me a spooky feeling I wanted to share. This relates to my previous vent about a hostile web, specifically how it gets harder and harder to use big parts of the web that used to be free and accessible if you are privacy conscious. Companies like Abstract, together with their attention merchant customers, are responsible for that. Of course their services are not perfect but it’s a cat and mouse of big corpo vs small users and a handful of non-profits.
A quote from the 2023 movie “The Pope’s Exorcist” comes to mind, even though it might be a little fatalistic:
“Ah, the other two percent,” Father Amorth replies solemnly. “That is something that has confounded all of science and all of medicine for a very long time. I call it…evil.” (cited via).
Link to the tracking enabling company proudly advertising their services. Take a look at their services in the attached photo and despair.
The commercial aggregation of disparate fingerprint signals into a unified identifier is precisely the mechanism that transforms benign tracking into systemic surveillance. This demonstrates how device fingerprinting bypasses standard cookie-based protections to create persistent, cross-site tracking vectors that are notoriously difficult for users to audit or delete.