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Google Is A Serial Tracker (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Two Princeton academics conducted a massive research into how websites track users using various techniques. The results of the study, which they claim to be the biggest to date, shows that Google, through multiple domains, is tracking users on around 80 percent of all Top 1 Million domains. Researchers say that Google-owned domains account for the top 5 most popular trackers and 12 of the top 20 tracker domains. Additionally, besides tracking scripts, HTML5 canvas fingerprinting and WebRTC local IP discover, researchers discovered a new user fingerprinting technique that uses the AudioContext API. Third-party trackers use it to send low-frequency sounds to a user's PC and measure how the PC processes the data, creating an unique fingerprint based on the user's hardware and software capabilities. A demo page for this technique is available. Of course, this sort of thing is nothing new and occurs all across the web and beyond. MIT and Oxford published a study this week that revealed that Twitter location tags on only a few tweets can reveal details about the account's owner, such as his/her real world address, hobbies and medical history. Another recently released study by Stanford shows that phone call metadata can also be used to infer personal details about a phone owner.
between my wife and kids and I we have almost a dozen laptops, phones and tablets at home. My wife used to buy underwear for herself on the macbook at home. week later on my lenovo at work i'm seeing ads from the same sites she visited. same with Fredricks of Hollywood. she bought a costume there for halloween and i saw their ads at work with half naked women on my slashdot page.
Decentraleyes is a start but it doesn't keep local copies of everything.
It also doesn't play well with other stalker-blockers because it intercepts the access to the actual website. So if adblock stopped the browser from even trying to go to the website then decentraleyes doesn't get a chance to do its thing. But if you completely unblock the website than anything decentraleyes misses ends up going to the real website.
Oh the irony. "Don't be evil". Perhaps Larry & Serge should have paid attention to Friedrich Nietzsche
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."