Hello, smart people. Filling out an online form to volunteer for something, Firefox’s Facebook-fence icon appeared on the email field. Confused, I clicked on its question mark. On the next page, Mozilla wanted to sell me Firefox relay for $7/mo. (That’s their VPN + email masking + phone masking.) I used my yandex.ru email address instead for $0. Here’s the question: is Facebook really able to track me because I’ve signed up to volunteer for Cornel West (setting aside the FB-Russia blockage issue)? Thanks.
I just looked up user agent. If I understand correctly, that changes every time I change browsers. Does it also change every time I clear the cache?
User agent has quite a few things included, such as browser and operating system, so if you use a different browser, you’ll have a different user agent. The trouble with user agent is that some techniques used to try and make it more anonymous ironically make it easier to track. There’s not really a good option. Although it’s definitely worth getting a user agent switching plugin to disguise yourself as Google bot so you can bypass paywalls
Thanks. Magnolia does the paywall thing for me. :)
Some browsers have proprietary APIs that break web standards (see Chrome), and sometimes, workarounds are needed for some browsers. Changing the user agent might break functionality.