So we took a family vacation recently and we had to drive halfway across America and what creeped me the fuck out was how we were getting such different prices on different phones while looking at the same hotel room on Priceline. For example I would look for a hotel in Chicago and find a room for a $180, then my cousin is also looking for a room on his phone and I look over and the same hotel room is $50-$70 cheaper. This kept on happening in every city we went to, like there was such a huge fluctuation between the prices one person would get on their phone and what someone else was getting. We noticed that the people with higher end Samsung phones were getting a much lower rate than those with cheaper phones. Have you ever experienced such price discrimination and is there really anyway to protect yourself from it? And do you think it’s ethical for companies to charge different rates for the same product? Should there be some legislation to protect consumers from this seeing as how AI is just going to make it easier for companies to price gouge consumers to the max.

      • wildginger
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        1 year ago

        So if I understand correctly, its just the unique cocktail of settings and OS identifiers that mark your print?

        So keeoing things default should mask you to some degree, right?

    • sadreality@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      If you don’t use hardened browser, you leave a trail that uqniue enough to ID you across web.

      Facebook and google have scrypts monitoring your moves on most of the websites.

      They sell this info

      • squiblet@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        An uncommon browser setup is also distinctive, though. One thing to do is use something like NoScript to not allow FB, Google etc to run scripts on pages. But how many people do that, like 1%? So it’s another data point.

        • sadreality@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          No doubt it has huge benefit as does unlock

          Using a few different browser for different uses cases will limit data point and keep clean profiles.

          So there is that.

          No easy way to do it.

      • wildginger
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        1 year ago

        Hardened browser being what, like tor? Cause I thought tor functioned somewhat similarly to a vpn.

        • sadreality@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Firefox needs to be configured.

          Librewolf works

          Mullvad browser too
          Maybe brave

          Tor too limiting for daily use

          • wildginger
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            1 year ago

            Do I need addons to do this for firefox, or is it some settings I need to fiddle with?

            Not to out my browser lol

            • melooone@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              If you want to harden Firefox, use ffprofile.com. It makes creating a custom profile very easy, and it should have good defaults. This should provide you with decent privacy and also allows you to remove annoyances like sponsored sites.

              Or if you are lazy, use LibreWolf which, as far as I know, basically does just that, but preconfigured for you.

              For addons, I would go with: uBlock Origin, CanvasBlocker, Privacy Badger and Decentraleyes.

              Finally you can test your setup with Panopticlick.

            • sadreality@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Deff will need a cocktail of extension.

              Ublock privacy badger noscrypt

              But people do different combos depending on their needs

              However each one makes you make unique, so back got he same problem so can’t load up too much nor is it needed.

              • wildginger
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                1 year ago

                Can you not set up to change the requested data each time you change sites? Or some other way of altering the print such that you arent the same print each time?

                • sadreality@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  I don’t sufficient expertise to answer that tbh

                  I just know to reduce parameters to limit ability to track. How mechanics would actually work is mystery to me lol

                  doing my part.jpeg

                  • wildginger
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                    1 year ago

                    Any level of answer is appreciated, I hadnt realized I was this detailed trackable without what you commented so far