Technology

I appreciate the list. I'm not saying there aren't valid concerns, just that in my day to day life it's one of those items where the steps needed to avoid browser fingerprinting is usually more work than the value I personally get from my perspective.

I've looked into this, and I'm not clueless. I've developed websites, I've done a lot of stuff with Selenium / Puppeteer, and have toyed with Firefox browser extensions.

I understand the tools they use and it's just very tricky to fully eliminate this type of thing. For example they can even use the browser window size. Are you going to randomly change window size to some novel dimension when you open up a tab?

What about the JS engine you use. For example using Firefox already narrows down your anonymity by like 95% or something because only a small amount of users use the browser. Etc etc

It's hard to do this correctly, and I feel like VPN + private window usually takes care of the price fixing thing on the list, for example. When I'm searching for flights I usually do this.

I also use JS blockers in order to try and mess up the scripts that Facebook & Google have hidden over the internet to track you. But ironically, doing that again reduces your anonymity. They know that if their scripts don't work on you, you get narrowed down again to a very small % of users.

It only takes a few of those pieces of data to be reasonably sure that it's you. Browser fingerprinting is tricky to really avoid. It's not impossible, of course. Just saying to really do it right it might be more effort than it's worth.

Torrenting itself is not illegal. The distribution of copyrighted material that you don’t own is the illegal part.

Different places have different laws

It's sort of legally gray but generally speaking in the US downloading is a civil offense but not a criminal one. You can get sued by the copyright holder for example but you won't end up in jail over it.

People usually never get sued for it because it's not worth it for Comcast to pay for lawyers to try and extract any money out of regular people. Not only will they almost certainly be unable to even recoup the lawyer fees, they risk getting a lot of bad PR for no gain.

What's usually considered an arrestable offense is uploading aka distribution. Once you start hosting seedboxes then you enter the area where you're liable to go to prison.