The title seems to suggest worse than the report. Can the information collected in incognito mode be traced back to you (assuming you aren’t logged into Google/Facebook).
It seems the only remediation would be for the browser to leak whether you’re using an incognito window, which would result in sites (e.g. paywalled news sites that give you 3 views per month) disallowing incognito entirely.
The comment that the report stems from Microsoft also makes the report feel dodgy; complain about a competitor in ways that sound bad but may not actually be.
> Can the information collected in incognito mode be traced back to you
Absolutely, but not necessarily with Google/FB's tracking systems. Your IP is enough to identify you and join to your other Internet activity, in most cases.
This is why Incognito Mode's New Tab Page says:
Your activity might still be visible to:
* Websites you visit
* Your employer or school
* Your internet service provider
Sorry I should have asked a better question: do the alleged trackers use low level tools that would bypass incognito (e.g. IP address, fingerprinting) to join your information with your non-incognito profile?
Yes. Browser have been making partial attempts to resist this, but it's an intractable problem in general -- You can't interact with a website without leaking information about yourself. Using a trusted proxy that serves many people can help.
Are there that many unique porn sites? Seems like you'd have to be doing things like counting every pornographic tumblr as a unique "site" to come up with a number that high. For purposes of figuring out who is tracking you, should an entire platform count as 1?
From the paper's methodology:
"In March 2018, we used a U.S.-based computer to analyze 22,484
pornography websites to identify the third-parties which may be
able to infer users’ sexual interests, and whether privacy policies
provide a sufficient vehicle for obtaining meaningful consent to
tracking. To create our population of pornography websites, we downloaded the homepages of the one million most popular web-
sites identified by the Alexa service. Upon downloading the home-
page, we extracted the page meta description information (a short
summary of the page’s content provided by the site developer) and
page title. Our population of pornography websites is comprised of
sites with ‘porn’ in the URL, meta description, or title of the page."
There are jobs that require you to look at porn. When I worked on Google Image Search I had to sign an addendum that I understood my job may require exposure to these images, exposure did not constitute sexual harassment, and I should view images only as needed for my work.
Some QC folk were in fairly private cubicles because they had to do testing on porn regularly. Hell, some could recite the ML grouping ID of major clusters of porn.
Really? On HN I only see work history cited to establish themselves as a primary source (avoiding a response of “citation?”) or to ethically disclose bias.
even irl, it’s part of the introduction “hi I’m so and so I work at google doing a <<super normal thing that I think is important or interesting but really isn’t to anyone else>>”
Clickbait, basically notes that major websites use analytics. Use uBlock/uMatrix everywhere, because Google and Facebook, and a lot more companies, are tracking your preferences in everything.
13 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 30.8 ms ] threadIt seems the only remediation would be for the browser to leak whether you’re using an incognito window, which would result in sites (e.g. paywalled news sites that give you 3 views per month) disallowing incognito entirely.
The comment that the report stems from Microsoft also makes the report feel dodgy; complain about a competitor in ways that sound bad but may not actually be.
Absolutely, but not necessarily with Google/FB's tracking systems. Your IP is enough to identify you and join to your other Internet activity, in most cases.
This is why Incognito Mode's New Tab Page says:
Someone got busted for looking at porn at work and tried to turn it around and say they were looking at it for science!
From the paper's methodology:
"In March 2018, we used a U.S.-based computer to analyze 22,484 pornography websites to identify the third-parties which may be able to infer users’ sexual interests, and whether privacy policies provide a sufficient vehicle for obtaining meaningful consent to tracking. To create our population of pornography websites, we downloaded the homepages of the one million most popular web- sites identified by the Alexa service. Upon downloading the home- page, we extracted the page meta description information (a short summary of the page’s content provided by the site developer) and page title. Our population of pornography websites is comprised of sites with ‘porn’ in the URL, meta description, or title of the page."
Some QC folk were in fairly private cubicles because they had to do testing on porn regularly. Hell, some could recite the ML grouping ID of major clusters of porn.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20467963 (132 points, 112 comments)