My reaction to this is always two fold; firstly cool tech, secondly horrifying invasion of privacy.

At {{job}} we did briefly consider rolling out fingerprint.com, but settled on ja3/ja4 at the CDN layer.

Cookies, in and of themselves, are not bad. Like any tool that can be misused, they're just being abused by a ton of really shitty people in an effort to try to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Cookies do solve a valid problem on the web, that being "How do we maintain 'state' from one page request to the next in a stateless protocol like HTTP(s)?"

Now we have a new (nearly impossible) problem to solve. "How do we prevent bad actors from abusing pretty much any feature of a public system which can possibly be abused, or reliably catch and punish the people who try?"

This is already illegal in the EU. The consent banners were never about cookies, they have always been about the tracking itself!

Same thing the other way: no need to have a banner for a simple login cookie which isn't being used for privacy-invading tracking purposes.

So what is next in this cat and mouse game? Fake-slow browser to miss fingerprint? Declare revolution and declare all advertising illegal?

> See, the thing is, it’s not about you at all. It’s not really about the ads anymore either. Nobody cares about you. And if the police or your government happen to care, I’ll gladly take their money too.

> I look at all this data and I don’t see people. I see patterns. Patterns emerging out of patterns. A living, digital fractal state of the economy, society and human psyche. The crystal ball of the 21st century and it’s made of silicon! That’s the product.

> And to the highest bidder it goes!

> What does that make you then? A gear? An ox? A volunteer?

This does absolutely nothing for me. If this resonates with you, can you explain?

I can understand worry about a tyrannical government, and if you have something like a gambling addiction I can understand about ads. But the meta-level privacy fear about deidentified patterns - I just plain don't get it.