this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (2 children)

Biounique id is an advertiser's wet dream and I don't think it's theoretically possible to prevent it from being exploited for profiling by Google. If the hashed encrypted token retains the uniqueness then it points to you as an individual across time, devices and location changes. There is no escaping this ID. You can't change it, you can't get a new one.

Google and other multinational corporations WILL know where you live and can figure out all your personal characteristics with a little time. Your anonymity is gone forever.

Sam Altman saw the film Minority Report in which iris scanners on holographic billboards trigger the advertisements to address you by name, hampering the escape of the central character who was being set up, and thought "Cool, let's make this. I'm going to be rich! The other dystopian aspects of the film are fiction, but this one I can make real."

[–] ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

In theory the unique id produced by the scan could be salted by you, uniquely for each website or application, and then provided to the site. This would keep aggregators from being able to track all your activity, or at least it would if they didn't already have fingerprinting techniques that do it without the need of another unique identifier.

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 7 points 19 hours ago

Also look at how FB et al can't even keep themselves from tracking you all over the internet using all kinds of clever engineering engineering beyond plain cookies.

If it actually becomes ubiquitous, the ability to tie all the anonymous impressions to one person is too tempting for surveillance ghouls.