this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
47 points (98.0% liked)
Privacy
30812 readers
1513 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As someone else said, Pixel for Pixel analysis is probably too much compute time for them to bother. But they can do a quick checksum on the file, and they probably do.
Whether the image seriously affects your online fingerprint is mostly about whether a lot of users or only a few users use that exact profile picture.
If they few users have that exact profile picture, then it's likely that they have a behavior tracking data set assigned to it, in case it's valuable later.
It's not that someone is sitting in a room correlating and judging your choice of picture. It's just that every aspect of your web browsing that can be cheaply tracked and correlated is tracked and correlated.
An image that too many people use is likely also correlated, but won't be heavily weighted in deciding that traffic is yours, because the error rate is too high.
That's why I always set my profile image to "Mickey Mouse" while I listen to music by The Beatles. It makes me invisible. Also I just really like Mickey Mouse.