Image description:

Shopping for a laptop as a Linux user:

Screenshot from the Simpsons where Otto is talking to Marge and Homer standing next to a window in their house with a caption “Oh wow, windows!.. I don’t think I can afford this place.”

  • cosmic_slate@dmv.socialEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    I’d imagine this line of thinking harmonizes with the herd mentality

    Yup, exactly! If your fingerprint is 1-in-10 it’d be easy to pick you out. If your fingerprint is 1-in-50,000,000, it’d take far more work.

    I think the solution is for privacy protections to be established as a default on platforms used by a lot of people but there’s very little incentive for Google to do this, and I don’t think Microsoft cares.

    For better-or-worse, Apple is the only major (well, double-digit marketshare) platform remotely attempting this right now. Consider their blocking advertising trackers for all users of Mobile Safari. You can’t really narrow down Safari users by “those who use privacy protection” and “those who are on vanilla installs”.

    There aren’t enough Linux users to hide amongst so I suppose the next best thing is to get your fingerprint to match a typical user on another widely-used platform. In this example, pretending to be Safari.