Comment by gweinberg

The problem we’re falling into under this (ostensibly accurate) point is when we start making this a game, where fingerprinting is either “100% effective and insidious”, or “can’t be 100% certain 100% of the time, so it’s ineffective and nobody will use it against me”.

The point is that a sufficiently motivated actor could use a very broad array of tactics, some automated and some manual, to identify, observe, track, and/or locate a target. Maybe they can’t pin you down with your browser fingerprints because you’ve been smart enough to use tools that obfuscate it, but that’s not happening in a vacuum. Correlating one otherwise useless datapoint that happens to persist long enough to tie things together at even low-ish confidence is still a hugely worthwhile sieve with which to filter people out of the possibility pool.

The problem isn’t that it doesn’t affect most average people, or that it it’s terribly imprecise. The problem is that it’s even a little effective, while being nearly impossible to completely avoid. It’s also a problem if that’s used by a malicious state actor against a journalist, to pick a rather obvious example. Because even in isolation, this kind of violation of civil liberties necessarily impacts all of society.

The public should be given more information and control, broadly speaking, for when they are asked to trade their rights for convenience, security, and/or commerce. In particular, I think the United States has allowed bad faith arguments against regulatory actions and basic consumer rights so corporate lobbyists can steamroll any chance of even baseline protections. It would behoove all of us to be more distrustful of companies and moneyed interests, while being more engaged with, and demanding of, our governments.

But they still wouldn't be able to confidently connect his different fingerprints to the same individual, just that he is one of a group of individuals who fake their fingerprints.