this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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I honestly don't think it has anything to do with that. Scrapers going to scrape. They just want more metadata to identify you and know what propaganda to feed to you based on our online habits. The amount of techniques to identify someone based on JS alone should stir a rebellion, but we just accept it. If you have JS enabled, I can tell you what OS you use, what kind of processor you have, info about your graphics card, monitor resolution, etc. I can even identify you based on how your computer renders graphics. Oh, you've disabled JS and opted out of us tracking you based on X, Y, Z.. great, now we can identify you based on your privacy settings.
What is JS?
Javascript
JavaScript, code that websites can run in your browser when you open them
If you're on a website and you click a button and something happens other than going to a different page or downloading a file, it's almost always because of JavaScript (JS)
It's a programming language that's built into most browsers that allows for interactive functionality. It's implemented in a way that typically protects the security of the computer, because it doesn't have access to the files on the computer or other sensitive things.
Because it can't directly check a lot of things, browsers often provide a way for people writing websites to check what capabilities they can use.
This means there's a way to ask "can I do 3d graphics using this particular feature?”.
The intent is so you can let your website handle computers that can't do what you need, rather than just trying and crashing.
Sufficiently determined people can ask for all of the various clues that are provided, and use that to make a pretty unique identifier for the computer, which they can then use to track you around the Internet.
Various ways of fixing this have been proposed, but they all fall short one way or another.
Either by making the web far less interactive than people have come to expect, making tracking easier but at least they're not misusing the data, or requiring an unrealistic amount of reworking how the entire web works.