this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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that's why i do everything that's transactional in an incognito window. i have plenty of non-incognito tabs but they're nearly all sites i log into on the regular such as lemmy. combine that with firefox's built-in privacy protections and ublock origin, which is a combo that absolutely wrecks a lot of tracking and browser fingerprinting scripts to begin with (i have actually done contract work for marketing communications people and it was crazy how many layers of defense i needed to peel back just to debug their shit) and most of that tracking becomes disjointed cookies that only span a single session each and are hella hard to correlate.
yeah, the thing that stops browser fingerprinting on the threat level of ad companies is firefox's built-in protections (which are in fact stronger in incognito) and ublock origin; and umatrix, full script blocking, and probably prayers on tor's level.
what incognito does is it breaks apart your chain of regular cookies. those can still slip through a lot of these tools, especially when they're first-party, but they're also kinda low-tech because of being first party most of the time (while the third party ones are easily blocked by other tools). that way the trace you leave behind is not one long thing, but many small ones that are hard to connect.
incognito is just one layer of defense but it's an important one
Container tabs are great for shit you log into, because they're like having a bunch of different, isolated browsers. For example, even if there was a YouTube embed here (which I haven't seen on Lemmy yet) it wouldn't be able to correlate those views to my account because I'm logged in in a different tab, from the way Google sees it it could be anyone on my network. Incognito is similar to that in that you grab a new browser every time and discard it whenever you close the last tab. It's great for transactional stuff, but a little inconvenient for stuff you want to keep logged into, which is where container tabs are great.
And yeah, there are some hella strong fingerprinting techniques, but no one is reimplementing any of those for advertising reasons. They just pull in a script from an ad company, which gets promptly blocked by uBlock Origin. If you use Tor and want to do some stuff that you really need to hide your identity for, you might run into some more advanced attempts to track you.