TIL that you can get much lower online prices if you use a local library computer. Another reason to hate retailers.
Lora Kelley took a trip to the New York Public Library for us and compared prices against a personal iPhone. The results? A box of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios and a pack of toilet paper were nearly 20% cheaper on the library desktop.
This is why I have a botnet of poor people’s computers
This is not true in general. Some sites could charge you more based on your fingerprinting, but very few do as it’s easily proven and would cause massive backlash.
Amazon does for sure.
Clear your cookies people
That doesn’t help anymore. These days they use device identifiers and IP addresses and all kinds of stuff like that to see if you’re the same person or not. I would imagine that in this case going to your own laptop or desktop would result in the same prices.
If you really want to hide try a browser like the Mullvad browser that specifically resizes and changes things used for fingerprinting.
Device finger printing should be illegal.
Our government is run by sleeping 90 year olds. We should have a lot of laws right now that aren’t on the books.
Musk is suing right now to make sure they don’t make his illegal porn program illegal.
Well, also use privacy badger
Not using a Nazi supporting browser.
https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.html
deleted by creator
That’s simplifying things to the point of being useless. Seriously, can’t we have just a bit of nuance?
There are legit, actual neo-nazis out there. I don’t have much sympathy for Daniel Berntsson, and he clearly has some shitty ideas and positions, but calling Mullvad browser a “Nazi supporting browser” because Mullvad’s rich co-founder made a donation without telling the company is just conflating everything into a big muddy thought soup.
It’s hard to say, but they do call for ethnic cleansing or “remigration” of citizens. That means concentration camps. What the US is doing now but worse. They also have socialist policies. So by combining nationalist and socialist (populist) policies, they are kinda reinventing Nazism. They are a serious threat.
It really is fucking sad because they were allies in the war against privacy, but you have to draw the line at ethnic cleansing.
Then choose a different one that does the same kind of fingerprinting protection, that’s why I said like Mullvad.
Heard good things about ivpn and am looking at them for my new one as my sub is running out shortly.
Funny that vpns are banned here.
I absolutely adore IVPN and do highly recommend them but eventually switched to Mullvad for higher speeds. I also think IVPN isn’t IPv6 friendly if I remember correctly.
Clear your cookies and use a VPN. (And your browser probably has a setting you can enable to clear your cookies automatically every time you close out.)
Rtfa
Read the Flatulent Anus? Wow. I mean, I’ve heard of reading tea leaves, but …
Both methods are equally accurate.
It’s not the library, it’s the cache you never clear. She could have done this just as easily at home on a browser with a private window she hadn’t signed into.
It’s also using an iPhone instead of a desktop PC. Retailers think all iPhone users are rich (or at least less price-sensitive).
With the same IP, CPU, GPU, and networkcard??
Easily fingerprintable
I would like to know how you plan to get the same ip, cpu, gpu and network card into her iphone.
Easily obfuscated, but also just clearing cache or using private browsing will more likely than not work.
I tried using waterfox and librewolf i think.
Every click on a new site was 5 capchas, its horrendously unusable, since probably they assume that all obfuscated user agent and other data are bots
I tried LibreWolf. It was such a bad experience.
It’s a shame that the Internet is so bad that the browser has to go to such extreme lengths to give you any privacy that it makes the experience awful.
It definitely isn’t as graceful in the every day experience, but keeping a profile with resist fingerprinting disabled has helped the few times I need to get past turnstiles and whatnot that otherwise loop
It really is a shame that it’s come to this rock paper scissors war between the server’s usage, the user’s experience, and privacy. Currently privacy is what has been cut in favor of the other two. You have to work to maintain privacy now
Unless you’re running a virtual GPU (and changing it often enough to remain anonymous), tracking pixels are pretty difficult to obfuscate (the exact thermal environment your PC is in will even effect timing).
And thanks to big tech this state of the art tracking is on essentially every website.
Clearing site data/private mode is a way to ask nicely that websites don’t track you, but user intention hasn’t been respected for around 3 decades by now.
Cache != Cookies
Is it possible to instruct the browser, via extensions or something, to simply withhold that kind of information? I know websites need to render the page differently for different browsers and OS, but when it comes to things involving payment I’d rather deal with the browser quirks than get ripped off.
Yes, but then that itself becomes a signal.
You have to not only resist fingerprinting, but do it in the same way as other people who resist fingerprinting.
It also marks you as extremely tech savvy, meaning you likely have large disposable incoming.
Only possible if you go to greater measures than just an extension.
https://understandingdata.com/posts/what-is-a-digital-fingerprint/
Use tor browser or librewolf with a vpn that isnt owned by Kape. Check to make sure all cookies are deleted each session. Make each purchase with a new account. Ideally using an email alias otherwise it gets cumbersome fast. Personally I also use a one time virtual debit card.
Oh yea! I’ll just use tor! I fucking love only getting 10% of my network speed and having 70% of websites be an unfunctionable mess! Totally a valid and reasonable workaround!
… then enable JavaScript? And this was to avoid price manipulation, not day to day use?
Dumbass comment. JS can easily reveal your IP and identity.
This isn’t to avoid targeted government surveillance for fucks sake 🤦♂️ they want the lowest price on amazon, not to plan a coup.
All the more reason to use a VPN.
If I were a company looking to optimize profit by pricing goods at whatever limit the targeted consumer demographic would be willing to pay for, I would use a VPN as a signal to raise the price.
It doesn’t matter who that consumer is behind the VPN. The VPN itself is a monthly subscription, and that indicates he/she has at enough disposable income to afford non-essential services.
To that point the library computer is free. I don’t know anything about VPNs or how to use them and I definitely shouldn’t have to pay for something for basic privacy. Library users improve the demand for libraries. Using a library computer is a win in basically all ways that really matter.
Rtfa
Hmm. I’ve never seen a difference between online prices and the price on the shelf at the store.
Are the prices lower than what is on the shelf?
Maybe this is something to do with New York. I doubt it’s true anywhere else. Maybe other big cities.
I find this hard to believe as well. There is very little information given and it seems more likely they accidentally shopped at two different targets. I’ve heard the same claim about plane tickets, also mentioned in the article, and have never experienced it as well. Though there is a lot more evidence to back that claim up.
My comparisons have been between my work laptop and my personal computer. Two completely different machines, different IP addresses and vastly different habits on those machines. I never even log into my accounts on my work machine.
