- Joined
- Jul 16, 2020
To add my own weird story to the list, I believed for almost two years that I had found a sandbox-breaking tracker on Youtube and Firefox Mobile before realising that it wasn't a thing. It started when I went to Greece and coincidentally switched browsers there, and noticed that YouTube stayed in Greek on Firefox Mobile and only ever on Firefox Mobile. Not Brave on Android, not Firefox on GNU/Linux. I started methodically ruling out sources of persistence one-by-one: it wasn't a cookie or my throwaway account, it wasn't my location, I reinstalled the browser and it kept happening anyways. I talked to a PHD candidate who focuses on Web trackers, but we didn't come up with anything. Then all of a sudden, as I was looking around the available information aimlessly, I saw my HTTP headers:
I connected the dots: I had Greek as a secondary locale to be able to type some of the letters despite not knowing any Greek. This particular header confused and still confuses YouTube specifically, and Chromium-derived browsers send a slightly different value that doesn't. The otherworldly browser fingerprinting I saw on display was an illusion and everything else was just a coincidence.
Moral of the story: while Web trackers and other invasive antifeatures are definitely a reality and a legitimate research topic, the human brain is very prone to drawing extreme conclusions from what could be one-offs, weird coincidences, or unknown facts. Perhaps because we don't have enough resources to process all this complexity and need to make decisions nonetheless. I would caution against calling spyware without solid evidence like some people in this thread — especially if you're schiz —, since most spyware is eventually known and well documented.
HTTP:
Language: fr-CH,el-GR;q=0.5Moral of the story: while Web trackers and other invasive antifeatures are definitely a reality and a legitimate research topic, the human brain is very prone to drawing extreme conclusions from what could be one-offs, weird coincidences, or unknown facts. Perhaps because we don't have enough resources to process all this complexity and need to make decisions nonetheless. I would caution against calling spyware without solid evidence like some people in this thread — especially if you're schiz —, since most spyware is eventually known and well documented.
