• kava@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    no prob. the fingerprinting thing is actually quite common. many popular websites have code on them from big companies like Google & Facebook that will check for browser fingerprints so that they can track you across the internet.

    for example some website that is a blog about corgis wants to use google analytics. so they copy paste the google analytics code onto their html. that way they can get all sorts of useful statistics about who is visiting their website, how long they stay, etc. but Google doesn’t do this for free out of altruism - google makes sure that every user that goes onto your website now gets tracked.

    so using browser fingerprinting, google knows you visited the corgi blog website even though they don’t own that website and you never used Google to click on it.

    basically the whole internet has these types of trackers. so google and facebook know your interests, your porn preferences, your health issues, etc all sorts of interesting things just by things like browser fingerprints.

    there are ways around this, although it’s an ever-increasing arms race between privacy activists & companies like Google/Facebook