When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you're giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you'd get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that's the only reason why they have value at all.)
So what's the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I'm not joking. Look at these:
when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don't allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for "security reasons", meanwhile i'm using VPNs in browser's incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.
I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it's our data. That's exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to "communicate with other people": your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.
Those aren't paywalls.
That's not what a VPN or incognito modes do.
Reddit sucks for a number of reasons, but your internet literacy also kinda sucks.
They are. You pay with you being tracked, profiled, your data etc for advertisement and other uses. That's what these "free" services use to monetise the user.
Yea but thats not what a paywall actually is.
well it feels like one
Toy companies don't expect kids to spend their own money on the products they learn of though targeted advertising.
Ok, but a cash register isnt a paywall. A paywall is a specific thing with an actual definition.
And you believe that definition isn't exchange of funds for goods and/or services?
VPNs prevent the site from attaching an IP address to the site visit, and incognito mode means that browser cookies routinely get scrapped.
While this is a popular selling point that VPN providers like to advertise, it's pretty misleading in terms of what this actually means with regards to tracking. Realistically, this does almost nothing to prevent sites from tracking you. They don't see you at your home IP as "John Smith" and see you on your VPN as "Hans Schneider", instead they see you at your home IP as "John Smith" and on your VPN as "still John Smith, but either traveling in Germany or using a European VPN".
Advertisers have tens of thousands of individual data points on nearly every single person who uses the internet at all for any purpose. All a VPN does is obfuscate ONE data point. That's less than 1% effectiveness at hiding your identity from advertisers. A VPN does basically nothing against all the other fingerprinting methods advertisers have.
Think of using a VPN like speaking into a walkie-talkie: your voice comes out at a different location, but if the person on the other end already knows what your voice sounds like, then they still know who you are, just not necessarily where you are. Unless you're taking other efforts to mask your voice, the walkie-talkie isn't protecting your identity in any way. Likewise with a VPN, if you go to the same sites from the same devices and log into the same accounts and otherwise engage in the same online behavior, the VPN is only hiding where you are, but it's still trivially easy for an advertiser to determine who you are.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, because VPN providers harp on this idea so hard in their advertisements that it tricks people into thinking VPNs are capable of things that they just simply are not.
yeah i get your point but that's not what i meant. i'm using VPNs to do google searches, for example, in incognito browsing tab. so google knows the 10k searches i did, but it cannot connect them to each other, as session cookies between them are deleted each time i close the browser (which is about every few minutes). and i don't log in to any account in the incognito tab either, so it can't use account identities as fixed points either. and it cannot associate the queries by IP address either.
edit:
after seeing this website ... https://amiunique.org/fingerprint i get what you mean now. i have to think about this.
I think you are overestimating the capacity and will of advertisers to actually identify people like that. The data may be available for it in theory, but it's unlikely they built the systems to make it happen because they don't really have much economical interest to do so. They care about market segments, not individuals.
I had to work a bit on this kind of things. Most of those systems are really shitty and ineffective.
The little advertisers aren’t the scary ones. It’s Meta, Alphabet and Amazon that are scary and absolutely do fingerprint in this way. That said, the scale of these systems really does roll right past the individual user, unless someone really cares about YOU, but unless you’re doing something wrong, they don’t really give a shit. CSAM, illicit substances, amd more could probably be pretty easily rooted out by these systems, but that wouldn’t make-line-go-up so it doesn’t happen.
So how would one acquire the obfuscation they are seeking for? Making advertisers don't know who you are for everything you visit. Is it possible?
Uss the Librewolf browser. You need to turn off reduceFingerprinting and turn on WebGL to make some sites work, but even then if you go to CreepJS you will see that compared to Chrome, there is much less information like battery level, actual core/RAM count, etc for sites to use. And the browser has uBlock Origin to block ads and trackers, although turn off the Quick Fixes list as it might break YT bot protection and shadowban comments.
Not the OP you asked, but realisticly, your single best option is not giving any data. Use settings to prevent cross-site tracking in your browser where available, but really just post as little information as possible. The less you reveal, the less they will know.
Try this while on a VPN and in incognito mode: https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
I bet you'll be surprised at the methods companies use to fingerprint you - browser agent, Do Not Track enabled/disabled, timezone, screen size.. not accepting cookies is also a data point to filter you by.
wtf. why does my browser send such an uniquely identifying token. wtf
(there's more to the right of it, i cut it to preserve privacy)
WTF
TIL. the way trackers can do stuff
Opens your eyes quite a bit, heh? It's like you start seeing the matrix. Then you think of your friends and family, the "normies", and realize they have zero chance. We have all become a cog in this advertising machine.
Why?
The concept of "paying for something" isn't limited to "paying with fiat money/currency". One can "pay for something" by "paying with their attention/time", one can "pay for something" by "paying with PII" (personally-identifiable information), both situations of which are present in both Reddit's and Meta's "Sign up to read this".
Sure, Reddit and Instagram/Facebook are "free" insofar the user isn't required to do any kind of bank/credit card/cash/cryptocurrency payment, but the user ends up paying with all the time they spend in these platforms while seeing (thus, giving part of their attention span) advertisement, and also hand personal data.
When it comes to PII, even if the user set up a pseudonym and a generic PFP, the user is still handing, even if unbeknownst to the user themselves, their preferences, opinions, etc. Even lurkers end up handing PII whenever they stop at certain posts to read/see it (thus, signaling one's preferences) or use specific search queries (again, signaling one's preference).
The incognito mode may not prevent tracking (especially because of the IP address), but rotating VPNs may do. Notice I used the word "may", not "will do", because of the behavioral tracking I mentioned earlier, as well as other technical aspects (DNS leaking, browser fingerprinting, etc).
People who can afford being an actor/actress and performing very convincing alt-personas behind a VPN IP address could theoretically fool platforms enough for the person not to be tracked by their gait... except this dramaturgical skill is a behavioral tell (gait) itself. And the usage of a VPN-assigned IP address is another tell.
!technology@lemmy.world
It absolutely is. I've verified this by toggling the VPN off and wallah access is restored.
That's because Reddit bans VPN IP addresses. You still have an IP address when using a VPN, and VPN IPs aren't exactly secret information. Reddit blocks all the VPNs they know of with an ever-updating blacklist.
Yes, that's what was said...
Please tell me this is a joke/reference.
Not a reference, just a little BoneAppleTea for breakfast 😉