this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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I think Meta has very complex fingerprint service in their backend after all these years. They know what you are doing even when you are not using their service. Their tracking in bundled up in long chains of tracking services over many websites. As long as you use a non vanilla browser to access their service, they might have you in their database from a previous tracker that trapped you on one of the many websites that are selling/trading tracking fingerprints. Since a decade it is not about the IP anymore. You can data-triangulate personas and pinpoint them to an existing user-profile with a very high accuracy. It should be possible to visit the threads service with a VPN and a heavy neutered browser. But then again, if your request is to suspicious in its request (thinking tor-browser, command-line browser, etc.) they might put you as well on a detour for a captcha/recognizer that will look harmless in the fronted ("click all the cars!") but its actual task is processing/scraping a fingerprint from your display-device (browser) that then again can be connected with this suspicious request for the future. I am sure that their VPN block is not 100% blocking Europeans, but will block most of the unsophisticated request from normal users that will just give up after some tries.
Here are some vectors for identifying users (via browserleaks): IP, JavaScript, WebRTC, Canvas, WebGL, Installed Fonts, Geolocation, Feature Detection, SSL certs, content filter.
Edit: I might get some downvotes for this, but iOS has some good protections build into their OS layer (so they say) to make it harder for advertisers to track you. See also this very well done 1 Minute ad showcasing how the modern internet ad industry works.
Sounds interesting. Do you have a source, or further reading for any of this?
There is a lot out there. You could just start by the wiki entry and then go down the rabbit hole from there. I already linked to browserleaks, that lets you test all the vectors in their uniqueness on your machine. The thing is, that the companies that use those technologies not wish to show their hand, you know. Those things are hidden from the public eye and until now have not leaked in whole. The ad-industry is heavily using those techniques to auction off your page views to the highest bidder. You ever noticed when you go on a website and it takes the ads a second or two to load? That is the time frame where your fingerprint was determined and connected to a profile and then is offered to the ad-services "I have a male, white, mid-30, high income, from new york, looking for past interests [a,b,c], .... " and then ad-systems bid against each other to get the spot as they betting on being able to lure you in with their offer and will bet on their chance of converting their bid into a sell of a product. That all has nothing do to with just an IP. This goes waaay beyond that. Just google for this topic or "Fingerprint Analysis" in detail and you can find a lot of stuff. Check out the privacy boards of lemmy to find out more and how to protect yourself - if possible at all.
If I'm understanding that correctly, that would give ~14.6 million unique fingerprints just based on your browser. That's a lot, but also tiny compared to the billions of Meta users. I'm a little skeptical that they would be able to determine a user is from the EU without using IP or cookies.
Edit: If they block users who's fingerprint matches an EU user, and their IP comes from a known VPN service, then they could likely get pretty good accuracy. I wonder if there are any North Americans getting blocked while using a VPN.
Dont take this the wrong way, but this data is from 2010. It is 13 years old. The iPhone came out in 2007. Android in 2008. The internet and tracking advanced MASSIVELY since then. Google announced in 2020 that they no longer will support 3d party cookies in their own Chrome Browser. You can be sure, that they have advanced their system to a equally/more advanced system that they were doing this step. Allegedly based on advanced Fingerprints. And yes, an IP is still one parameter in tracking. But its not the only datapoint anymore since many years.
There's only so much information you can get with hardware though. No doubt the software in tracking fingerprints, and matching similar ones has become very sophisticated. However, I wouldn't be surprised if device fingerprints hasnt increased in diversity much.
On the other hand, maybe they're using a spectre/meltdown attack to get a MAC address or something. In that case, we're fucked.