Anonymity

[Peter Aretin]

How are websites able to identify me as a unique user? I have tried deleting their cookies, using a VPN, and Incognito mode in Chrome, and combinations of these, but no dice.

 

[honestone]

Excellent question! Have always wondered that myself.

Also, how do the keep following you around? Back in May, I did a couple of queries about round trip flights to London on a couple of sites (and eventually getting one). Man, for almost every site I subsequently visited, I was bombarded with info about London flights. Of course once our departure date passed, they stopped. Definitely p*ssed me off!

 

[Peter Aretin]

This newspaper site finally started putting up a window demanding I turn off my ad blocker to gain access. I can thwart that with a Javascript blocker, but can't post comments. So I turned off the ad blocker. Guess what the very first ad that came up was? An ad for an ad blocker. I am not making this up. The boobs that fall for that will find they can't access the paper if they use the ad blocker advertised in the same paper.

More annoying to me, is if I allow Javascript, they can keep track of the number of articles I read and block access after a while. This used to be by means of cookies, but deleting theirs no longer seems to work, unless they are naming a special cookie something sneaky and it isn't coming up in a search like all their other cookies. I hate to delete all cookies globally, since some are useful. As I said, VPN and Incognito don't work. At this point, it's a challenge.

 

[honestone]

Yeah, I'm with you! Seems like almost anything one does on the internet leaves to being followed.

 

[Peter Aretin]

I'm more concerned with the problem of not being recognized.