Supercookie: Browser Fingerprinting via Favicon (2021)

1st patch: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/patches/c...

Rename thumbnail to favicon: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/commits/master/patches/c...

Then abandoned in favor of Chromium including favicons in the regular cache https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45954466

I think two things keep the status quo where the end-user is exploited and attacked constantly. The first is the VC / Startup model. Because VC is the true customer, and not the end-user. The second is the current marketing and advertising model. Can it keep working well enough to be worth the money? When it's not, the bottom falls out.

Old business model: solve a problem for your customer, add some value, take home a cut. Current business model: solve investment return for your investors, get the returns by addicting your end-user to something they don't need. Future business model: ?

If you visit my eg. physical clothing store I'm allowed to monitor your in-shop behavior to better optimize my store for your needs. Same for a restaurant etc. That how _you_ get _much improved services_ and I get _happier customers_.

Ofc I'm not allowed to freaking resell that data. THIS is the problem in online: releseling and data-brokers. Just KILL these categories of businesses off completely and make _them_ criminal (like even give f prison sentences to them).

We should get back to our sanity in ONLINE. As long as you're on _my (online) property_ and using _my services_ I can of course see EVERYTHING you f do, and should stop pretending I don't. As long as I'm not sharing this data with anyone else, I should be 100% allowed to use every drop of this data to improve my services to you and totally differentiate myself from the incompetent competition that can't properly do this.

Data privacy (from EU's GDPR to... everything else) only helps big corporations fend-off competition from small startups of boutique shops that could easily out-compete them by offering hyper-personalized hand tailored micro-optimized experiences for their smaller number of customers based on the loads of data they collect from them.

...we've all been brainwashed by this privacy psyop to sheepishly "fight for our privacy" in ways that are detrimental to us and only help our corporate oligarch overlords maintains an even tighter grip on power, while offering us worse and worse services. Wake the f up, DATA IS MEANT TO BE USED to IMPROVE goods and services, not remain uncollected or sit unused!

Isn't this covered by GDPR?

The only reason these things work is because we let our browsers silently execute arbitrary code. That logic is more like saying it is OK to enter a house because the owner sent you an invitation, then greeted you at the door and said "GO NUTS!".

I am not concerned with bieng tracked, and assume that large entities on the net have the ability to track and find anything or anybody, ho hum, but my simple personal requirement is not to be then sold to petty merchants and harassed in my own home with adds and fake "personalisations", and offered unasked for "help", so I watch closely, and go to any length to disable adds, or "fingerprinting", "profiling", or whatever. The net is horrible, I need socks, but as I am now sensitised to bieng tracked and followed, I will just get socks at the hardware store, rather then try and track down what were mentioned as perfect travellers socks and other gear, because the mountain of equipment relentlessly devoted to selling me anything from the waist down herafter is impossible to contemplate, and I now only use search for items required for my business, but am often forced to give up, as the vast majority of the web has been co-opted by major retailers. Even though I have never been on social media, have no accounts with any of the retailers, people are telling me that they found me and my business through an LLM, of some flavor, and/or were convinced of my abilities from my "5 star ratings", I am too busy currently to unravel, exactly how the data is put together and then used, but quite clearly, there is no way to use the net(however "lightly"), and not be swollowed up and commodified.

Umm...But it is criminal. The GDPR, at least, doesn't care how you track users - whether through cookies, local storage, favicon or whatever other mechanism you've developed. If you track users you must follow certain rules, and if don't, you will be facing fines if/when you're caught.

Popular browsers support tabs. When you have many tabs open, it's hard to show a meaningful title for each one. An icon takes up less place and is easier to scan for visually.

Do tabs in the popular graphical browsers display a number on each tab by default

This might be useful when switching from, e.g., tab#1 to tab#7, using keyboard shortcut Ctrl-7

I guess that you can do fingerprinting with any cached content, but the insane persistency of favicon's cache makes this much more concerning.

Where do you think the AI training data comes from?

Emoji-heavy documentation/commit messages always seem very popular in JS projects, as this is seems to be the project of a 12 year old I'm not too surprised that it's a bit unusual compared to others.

The link shows Chrome patched and unpatched this.