The core insight here: privacy isn’t this monolithic thing where you’re either completely anonymous or completely exposed. The author breaks it down into these two approaches - tracking reduction and tracking evasion - and that distinction actually matters a ton in practice. Someone worried about targeted ads has completely different needs than someone trying to avoid state-level surveillance. Both are “privacy concerns” but they’re worlds apart in terms of what you’d actually do about them.

The things that make you better at tracking reduction often make you worse at tracking evasion, and vice versa. It’s not just that they’re different approaches - they can actively undermine each other. This is the part that most privacy guides completely fail to explain, and it’s why you see people with these Frankenstein browser setups that are actually less private than if they’d just picked one coherent strategy.

  • chasteinsect@programming.devOP
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    3 days ago

    If you want to do tracking evasion you don’t want to do a lot of tracking prevention as tracking prevention is finger-printable itself and that will undermine tracking evasion. Think of things like adblockers where your particular combination of blocklists and custom rules might be nearly unique to you or doing stuff like disabling javascript.

    This is what the article talks about.

    • sexy_peach@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      If you want to do tracking evasion you don’t want to do a lot of tracking prevention as tracking prevention is finger-printable itself and that will undermine tracking evasion.

      it won’t though. They have underpaid programmers making bad tracking systems which track 95% of users, who cares about adblocker guys