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0 pointsifigjfur84855y ago0 comments

A better long term solution would be to make websites behave more like print has for the past 500 years, and only allow them to pull info from the server while greatly restricting what they can transmit back. Only allow POST buttons to send home strictly textual data the users themselves typed out. Yeah, this would break certain cool legit websites like those that run HTML5 games that need to constantly transmit info back to the server. But this wouldn't have to break sites like HN/Reddit/Twitter/news/science/whatever. If you wanted a web that could give you beautiful images and typography without fingerprinting, such a thing could be built. It would break big Adtech tracking though so we'll never see this simplifying improvement in a big-Adtech funded browser (like Chromium).

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kmeisthax5y ago

>and only allow them to pull info from the server while greatly restricting what they can transmit back

The first forms of user tracking involved 1px GIFs that existed purely so that the server could log the request. If you allow any code execution at all, then the client can send data back to the server by asking for data from the server. Reads are just bidirectional writes.

asdfjklk2345y ago

Those 1px GIFs were so that some server other than the one you are currently interacting with can track you. So if I go to nytimes.com I might get served a 1px GIF from BigAdTechCorp.com. The proposal is that all images, text, and data only come from the server you are currently pointing your browser at. So if you go to nytimes.com then only nytimes.com can send you text and images, only the nytimes.com server sees what content you request and when you request it. Once upon a time people purchased printed newspapers and magazines and there weren't all the invasive ways to spy on how long readers engaged with articles and images in said periodicals and yet we all managed. Marketing firms made ad buys all the same with this old tech and many successful ad campaigns happened, all without the invasive tracking.

codetrotter5y ago

> Only allow POST buttons to send home strictly textual data the users themselves typed out

I’m almost with you but in that case even shopping online would not work. Unless you force the user to manually type in the SKU of each item they want to add to their cart and so on. That’s not gonna happen :p

iuiujmfi7875y ago

Good point. There would be a few details like this to work out, of course. My first suggestion would be to allow text-boxes to be pre-populated with form data (like QTY and SKU) subject to tight restrictions. (There would be no script code sniffing the user's fingerprint before the text boxes are populated with SKU data, for example.) So a web dev could still create a shopping page with Add-to-Cart buttons such that clicking the button tells the server the SKU and QTY added to cart for session SESSION_ID. And the user transparently observes exactly which sequence of Unicode codepoints is being transmitted to the server upon clicking the Add-to-Cart button.

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