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Third Party Trackers On Web Shops Can Identify Users Behind Bitcoin Transactions (helpnetsecurity.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Help Net Security: More and more shopping websites accept cryptocurrencies as a method of payment, but users should be aware that these transactions can be used to deanonymize them -- even if they are using blockchain anonymity techniques such as CoinJoin. Independent researcher Dillon Reisman and Steven Goldfeder, Harry Kalodner and Arvind Narayanan from Princeton University have demonstrated that third-party online tracking provides enough information to identify a transaction on the blockchain, link it to the user's cookie and, ultimately, to the user's real identity. "Based on tracking cookies, the transaction can be linked to the user's activities across the web. And based on well-known Bitcoin address clustering techniques, it can be linked to their other Bitcoin transactions," they noted. "We show that a small amount of additional information, namely that two (or more) transactions were made by the same entity, is sufficient to undo the effect of mixing. While such auxiliary information is available to many potential entities -- merchants, other counterparties such as websites that accept donations, intermediaries such as payment processors, and potentially network eavesdroppers -- web trackers are in the ideal position to carry out this attack," they pointed out.
The only benefit of Bitcoin is that it's a pyramid scheme.
And they've really got you when you enter your name and shipping address.
From what I read in "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez, Facebook takes its own data and combines it with third-party data to create profiles on every user, whether logged in or browsing anonymously. If Facebook can do that, everyone else can do the same thing.
Or you're resisting a totalitarian regime that might put you in prison or a labor camp for purchasing an unapproved ebook.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
You are aware that companies are using advanced AI to individually identify anonymous Internet posters by analyzing the unique patterns of expletives that each uses in their messages?