Regarding "other websites can see your data if they are contained in Website A", that's not *technically* correct. Website B won't be able to know your Website A cookies. But it can (and often *does*) know it was included in Website A, and often where in the site it was included. So if part of Website B gets embedded inside 100's of sites, they can store a cookie with a random number the first time you visit one of those sites. And then, when you visit another site, it will check that random number and realize it's you again. Website B can then continue to track you across any site it's embedded in.
Good point - I tried to visualize that with the advertiser animation showing they placed their own versions of the cookies in parallel with the original ones, but it's pretty tricky. Thanks for the correction!
@@deltamico because, most of the time, at the very least, when your browser reaches out to Website B to get the image or whatever, it tells it what site it's embedded in. Additionally, if it's a script (and not just an image) it can just scan the page it's on.
@nikolaievans2432 They make more than enough to break even, the ads recently get intolerable, not because maintaining youtube is more expensive, but a pure need to make big number bigger and be greedy.
@@nikolaievans2432 yes its expensive to fund, but they DO have the money, what we criticize is the GREED that youtube has with advertisements, it isnt just to "pay the bills" it is to snag every last fucking cent out out of investors and advertisements at OUR cost.
I dropped social media, and I know a lot of my other activity is still tracked online, it did make me feel less anxious getting rid of facebook/instagram/telegram. Just a few fewer things tracking me and also fewer things making my phone addicting. I’ve noticed my anxiety around my phone has decreased since getting rid of social media. Not sure if this is right for you too, but it worked for me :)
He said on RUclips :P If it helps anything, with FireFox and FF-based browsers you can opt to block third-party cookies (may break some website, though I haven't had it happen to me even once in years); this will block all advertising and pixel-based tracking cookies Also, you can set it to clear cookies on exit, but you can add domains to a "whitelist" that _are_ stored normally; for example you can keep those of some websites you'd like to stay logged in as but any others (inc trackers that you don't know of) are cleared on exit every single day! ^ these two settings will help a ton! Well against everything not fingerprinting...
there's a version of ublock called "Ad Nauseam" which not only blocks ads but also clicks on all of them to deliberately mess up the ad networks' profile of you.
this was a very insightful video. as much as i hate cookies, i feel dumb for never trying to look deeper into it. it amazes me how these people managed to create something very useful, see its potential as a very profitable exploit, and decide unanimously that the internet was for the people, not for money hungry companies. you would wish more people were like this but so is the point of your end talk, it gave me hope for the future. thank you
I was very surprised while researching this, I went into it expecting to just hate on cookies. Admittedly, this is also the first time I had ever looked into it. I was also surprised how DEEP I had to go to find a lot of this stuff, like reading public chat logs from 1995, interviews with people that have only 100 views, reading newspaper articles from forever ago, like this wasn't in the Wikipedia page at all, nor in any other article I've read about them. I'm really glad people are already responding well to this video, because this has been in the works since early September haha
@rejectconvenience I am very happy i discovered your channel. you certainly put a lot of time and effort in your research and it shows in the quality of your videos, i was fascinated to see so many references and resource linked in the description of your videos, most people dont bother with such things. I wish your channel continues its upward trend, you discuss important topics that are so etched into our daily lives we simply do not bother to understand more about. The more people know about them (even if they dont do much about it) the better. your work is very valuable, and i hope it brings you value in return too.
@@rejectconvenience thanks for sticking with it! The fact there is little information easily available about the creation of something that plays such a large role in our lives online is more reason why you guys just did something important. This information should not be lost as a lot of information about the start of the internet has been. With the internet archive being under attack and losing, we are in danger of losing so much information that hasn’t been saved anywhere else not to mention what has already been lost and wasn’t archived. Thank you guys for doing the hard work.
I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being used in things like companies' training courses for online safety. The quality of your videos was already high, but this one is though the roof
Destin from the channel “smarter every day” has a really good data privacy 3 part video series if you like that type of thing! It’s really well made, Destin does really neat work
@@sullenscrHave you ever posed a 3d model? Sure, It _might_ be easier than fiddling with interpolation(I genuinely don't know), But it still takes a long time...
When i was little i somehow came under the impression that cookies was slang for boobs. So anytime a website warned me about cookies i just thought they were warning me i may see boobs, which i thought was weird, cuz it was on SO MANY SITES. Eventually i actually stopped and thought about it and figured out that was NOT what it meant, but it took me an embarrassingly long time. I still dont know how i came under that impression.
eh. i would guess theres alot of really weird uses cases cookies are amazing help with. but those are mostly for remembering the user did something while changing directory (so that the user does not need to do whatever was done again)
Typically, cookies don't contain actual user information or cart contents, they just a session ID, with the actual data stored server-side. Also in the early days it was pretty common for websites to put the session ID into the URL instead, and some software (such as phpBB) will still fall back to this behavior in some circumstances.
Manmade horrors within comprehension, but outside of my willingness to stay in my head. Would be better if it all were real cookies, internet would be an amazing place.
I know you're joking, but there was a whole thing a while back about your loan application being denied if you let your phone's battery drop too low on a regular basis
This rocks. I understood the basics of how cookies worked and that third-party cookies existed, but this video really broke it down in a way I could grasp. Awesome stuff.
we need more uplifting realism online instead of doomerism dominating every corner of the internet. like yeah, it sucks sometimes, but there's still plenty we can do about it, it's not 100% suck.
netscape had such a wonderful and responsible team, it makes me so happy to learn about a company that cared so much about making something for the people- not greedy companies. it's very sad they went under, but i'm sure its something they can all be very proud of looking back on. this video gave me so much more respect for stuff like this, great video!!
Incredible video! Amazing graphics and the message at the end hit home. Make something you're proud of, do something you love, share your skills and help others. The WWW is free, so we should be too! Didn't think I would be getting emotional over a video about cookies but here I am.
Talking about fingerprinting, I was made identifiable as a group of mere thousands of users simply because I had British English as one of my browser's display languages.
I wonder if most British English speakers don't bother changing their browser's language from the default U.S. English, so those who do are in the minority...
I really really love this video. Privacy is a huge deal to me. I'm a tech lead and I know first hand how much insight advertisers have into too much of our lives. I love the internet, but my perspective has shifted a LOT over the last several years. Seeing this video reminds me that there really are people that are and can make positive changes, and I love the reminder that we all have power here 😊
This was such a good video, definitely among my all-timers. Informative, complete, and also has a touch of optimism, but in a very logical way. Good stuff, I'm a fan!
I just discovered your channel and I really admire your videos! I especially appreciate the hopeful notes you bring to the table, it's kind of demoralizing sometimes seeing what the state of the internet is. It's good to remember where it all came from and that there are still a bunch of people working hard to make it less shitty. Thank you!!
I’m really glad I got recommended your video. It’s got a simplistic art style that I love seeing people use, and it helped me understand something that I really wanted to, that being cookies. I’ll spare the story, but the long and short of it is that during my freshman year of high school I did terrible on an essay that was also about cookies, and despite wanting to know what they were and what they did, I couldn’t find a way to comprehend them. I’m also really glad I wasn’t the only one who had a hard time finding the difference between cookies and fingerprinting. With all the hate cookies get, they are astronomically less harmful than fingerprinting is, but that’s exactly why I think couldn’t comprehend them. I wanted the cookie to be the villain so much that I assumed fingerprinting and cookies to be the same just so that I could say that they were bad. If it weren’t for your video, I don’t think I would’ve ever realized that, and now I’m motivated to try and give that essay another try and see if I can’t get it right this time. Tldr: great video, Will definitely share it around before binging your other videos 👍🏻
I like that when I started making my own website and taking part of the web revival, these videos started appearing on my feed. I hope more people would be aware on how crucial this movement is. Take control of ya'll privacy and works--you deserve better.
I’m glad I found this channel. Last night I watched your dumb phone videos and really related to them since I about a month ago just quit social media (well, aside from RUclips if you count that). Social media just wasn’t something I could really handle anymore and needed a break. This channel has got me thinking about what other tech/lifestyle rebalancing I might get up to. Thanks for the encouragement around learning about tech and learning about healthy habits when it comes to tech.
Yet another informative video. Thank you for providing this information and for providing the historical timeline that got us to where we are today with such tracking mechanisms. Keep at it, A.
Subscribed! This is more entertaining than the many online college courses I have taken. Passed them all but they're prerecorded lectures from a year or two ago. And you said it best, "Tech has always moved fast." I saw the previous vid you did that you mentioned in this one as well. Honestly web development is better done the hard way through JavaScript, PHP and SQL than the with Wixx. Wixx is like building a house with A.I. bots. It couldn't be secure, because they'd have the data to reverse engineer the architecture..... YOU KNOW THAT DAY IS COMING!
Ayyy looks like last week was a good time for me to stumble upon your videos! I think tech can be daunting and kind of scary for the layperson, so thank you for explaing it so calmly and concisely in your videos. Ending it on a more positive note makes me want to figure out how to make my own website! (As someone in her 20's, yes, I am also kind of a dunce)
I absolutely love your style and it's great to see someone put this much effort in their video (both with the animation and with the background on why cookies are even a thing)
I am a big fan of how much the movement away from convivence is becoming. People are starting to download mp3s, buy physical, pirate, or just make content that doesn't need a 24/7 internet connection.
Having more people switch to browsers like brave (and having better, more hardened defaults on Brave or Firefox) will help us all blend in better with larger numbers. If there are enough people blocking fingerprinting, we are far more anonymous in numbers.
My undergrad thesis is actually about fingerprinting and I'll help us discover browser APIs that are being abused for fingerprinting out in the wild so that mitigations can be developed.
Also, ending on an incredibly positive note whilst still acknowledging a huge problem is an amazing mindset and it makes me hopeful for humanity to know that people like you exist Liked, subscribed, and will stick around for more
3:29 this is inaccurate. unless your provider had a carrier-grade NAT (and NATs were really new at the time anyway, and CGNATs didn't exist until 2012 i think) you would not share IP addresses with other customers. Since nearly ALL people directly connected to their modems they would get their entire range of ports and have their very own ip address. The issue is that when NATs were invented and people wanted two computers to use one modem, the server wouldn't know which one is which without a client state object.
Signal uses phone numbers, which already contains some infotmation about a person. Proton is guilty of logging IPs, and probably more, and giving it to the authorities, with the latest one being a french activist in 2021, if my memory serves me right. Not to bring the video down - the quality is superb! But there are no fully private services left. If anyone wants to be private, then they have to set up the network themselves. Briar, Matrix, and Session are fine from what I heard, but more search is needed
Signal no longer uses phone numbers. Proton didn't exactly log IPs until the swiss authorities made them for that one user (they already had info on them, this just helped them build a case) but true that they do log IPs to some extent, but this is far far far better than the alternative of logging anything and everything you do. Matrix has it's own privacy concerns (iirc DMs could be sometimes read by owners of a domain), and briar seemingly offers nothing over competing apps other than the admittedly cool (but gimmicky) bluetooth option. You could theoretically just use simplex instead. Anyways the goal isn't perfection, that might be impossible, the goal is to maximize privacy but not at the cost of everything else.
@@ThompYTto my knowledge, you are still required to attach a phone number to your signal account, but you are no longer required to share that number with people. You do have to turn that off explicitly, though. Not quite the same as "not using a phone number," but miles better than it used to be.
@@kitlith it's used as a password and a bot detterent, it's not "using" it as an identifier of an account. If that was an issue then anything that uses a password would be a privacy concern according to you
It has certainly been frustrating, being one of those "paranoid" people who was aware of roughly how much was possibly being identified about me, and for ~20 years I've been "paranoid" about my personal info. The worst part, is like you said, I can still be identified through anyone I interact with, and by what information they DON'T receive from me. Thankfully I regularly try to find myself or my info online, and have been signed up to haveibeenpwned email alerts for nearly as long, and these days I can almost never find anything about me at all save a few posts from my early years on a blog I no longer have access to (and doesn't reveal any info anyway, though it does have my face) and I'd rather they have to infer than have concrete data at least.
16:41 The thing about fingerprinting is, as hinted, that both your existence AND your inexistence are trackable. The more you attempt to hide, the darker is the shadow that you leave behind. That is more or less why I use fingerprint scramblers (CanvasBlocker and AdNauseam) rather than fingerprint killers. Also, fingerprints don't even need to track specific aspects as cookies do. They don't need to wait for you to look up fridges in an online store to know you would want one. By knowing how long ago you bought your last fridge (say, 10 years ago) and your location (humid climate? maybe your fridge is showing rust), it can guess that you need a fridge now or soon, sell that guess to advertisers and now you get fridge ads. That goes to things the internet doesn't track either, like the possibility of you living alone (not many purchases? not much demand), how much time you spend on the internet (which can guess you are unemployed), etc. It doesn't know you, your name, or your face, but it will always know enough to sell you jobs, services and products. Fingerprinting is SUPER sneaky. It uses "normal/simple" information to infer/guess complex information; doesn't it sound like AI? Well, this is proof that machine learning has been a thing for decades now. AI buzzwords are all the talk, but it is all smoke and mirrors, we have always been under AI vigilance that digests massive amounts of data and guess who people are.
Glad to know my browser of choice is even better than I thought. Not only is it *currently* good for privacy, but it's owned by the guys who've *been* fighting the good fight for privacy
Wow, I had no idea that AOL used a separate Internet protocol. I always thought those AOL keywords that PBS shows gave you were just a convenient shortcut for you to enter in your browser so you wouldn't have to type the full Internet address.
everybody wants my data but I keep ignoring the ads and everything they try to do to market me. also, once I'm dead all those data will be there taking dust and serving nobody
0:15 “but a majority of us don’t know what they are” How sad. When I started accessing the web, anyone able to use it knew most of the details of how it worked. I imagine this is how people felt during the Industrial Revolution who grew up with the technology who then found a bunch of people using it poorly and not understanding the nuances of engineering.
Every useful feature of web design and interactivity will eventually be consumed by advertising, scam artists, or hackers, which are indistinguishable from each other.
im learning how to code with java and css, and cookies are really, really helpful for development. Im currently trying to make one of my extensions (dark mode for a website) remember what value the user wanted the background to be with a slider. im using a cookie to remember where they put that slider, which i found extremely cool!
Yeah, that's the way they should be used and the intention they were created with. Didn't stop sillicon valley from abusing it to gain info they shouldn't have, and since law moves at a turtle's pace when compared to the internet, it's not illegal to do so although very morally dubious.
This video explains how cookies are given to websites, but it doesn't explain how websites get the information for fingerprinting, as if it was immediately obvious where they get the data from. you could've explained that with a little more detail.
I wouldn't be surprised if fingerprinting were to get its own video in the future, but he didn't wanna promise that video without it already being some amount of the way through production
@@CorruptedKarmaCookies and fingerprints are not the same. Fingerprints aren’t text files the website downloads to your browser. Instead, fingerprints are obtained by, for example, a website using an image to test how your hardware performs when it renders it.
Fingerprinting is possible mostly because websites have access to this information via Javascript. For example, a website needs to know the size of the screen or whether the user prefers dark or light mode, in order to decide how to display the information to the user. Therefore, the browser will provide this information to the websites. Fingerprinting takes advantage of this kind of information to create a unique identifier.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the importance of regulations on privacy, but this was still an excellent video nonetheless. I liked how you managed to stay optimistic too, even amidst the current almost dystopian state of tracking.
I mean technically they could send non-essential tracking cookies to track you if you only accept essential cookies. However there are legal regulations around it, so doing so risks them getting sued and facing legal penalties.
I worked at a place with one of those old box monitors running an old Windows OS (I dont remember which, 98 I think.) And boy howdy those things ARE heavy. I knew they were, but Id forgotten how much.
![Hunxho - Ball Forever [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nki9ZTF9Uls/mqdefault.jpg)
Regarding "other websites can see your data if they are contained in Website A", that's not *technically* correct. Website B won't be able to know your Website A cookies. But it can (and often *does*) know it was included in Website A, and often where in the site it was included. So if part of Website B gets embedded inside 100's of sites, they can store a cookie with a random number the first time you visit one of those sites. And then, when you visit another site, it will check that random number and realize it's you again. Website B can then continue to track you across any site it's embedded in.
Good point - I tried to visualize that with the advertiser animation showing they placed their own versions of the cookies in parallel with the original ones, but it's pretty tricky. Thanks for the correction!
@@rejectconvenience of course, yeah! It gets really technical, and I understand why you'd want to simplify.
So you load both site A and a part of site B (an ad) and each sees its own cookie. How does B know it was included in A?
@@deltamico because, most of the time, at the very least, when your browser reaches out to Website B to get the image or whatever, it tells it what site it's embedded in. Additionally, if it's a script (and not just an image) it can just scan the page it's on.
@@deltamicoby A asking for the resources from B and including the info in the request (A tells B directly)
Advertisers ruin everything. They ruined privacy, entertainment, cookies, everything. I absolutely hate ads, thank god for uBlock
You realize youtube is very expensive to fund right?
Also advertising has been around since the internet even started
@nikolaievans2432
They make more than enough to break even, the ads recently get intolerable, not because maintaining youtube is more expensive, but a pure need to make big number bigger and be greedy.
@@nikolaievans2432 yes its expensive to fund, but they DO have the money, what we criticize is the GREED that youtube has with advertisements, it isnt just to "pay the bills" it is to snag every last fucking cent out out of investors and advertisements at OUR cost.
@@nikolaievans2432doesnt make em fucking good now does it?
It always fills me with dread when I'm reminded that I'm basically being tracked all the time.
That's why I really thought it was important to remember that you can be the change you want to see!
I dropped social media, and I know a lot of my other activity is still tracked online, it did make me feel less anxious getting rid of facebook/instagram/telegram. Just a few fewer things tracking me and also fewer things making my phone addicting. I’ve noticed my anxiety around my phone has decreased since getting rid of social media. Not sure if this is right for you too, but it worked for me :)
👀😶
I’m perfectly fine with that until I get hacked, so in the middle I suppose
He said on RUclips :P
If it helps anything, with FireFox and FF-based browsers you can opt to block third-party cookies (may break some website, though I haven't had it happen to me even once in years); this will block all advertising and pixel-based tracking cookies
Also, you can set it to clear cookies on exit, but you can add domains to a "whitelist" that _are_ stored normally; for example you can keep those of some websites you'd like to stay logged in as but any others (inc trackers that you don't know of) are cleared on exit every single day!
^ these two settings will help a ton!
Well against everything not fingerprinting...
randomizing the data you don't want them to have is the way to go because providing inaccurate date devalues the data set as a whole
AdNauseam
I commented 8 times and all the comments get deleted. Google definitely doesn't want people to know the details about this kind of thing.
check Rudderstack documentation
What's the best way to do that?
there's a version of ublock called "Ad Nauseam" which not only blocks ads but also clicks on all of them to deliberately mess up the ad networks' profile of you.
this was a very insightful video. as much as i hate cookies, i feel dumb for never trying to look deeper into it. it amazes me how these people managed to create something very useful, see its potential as a very profitable exploit, and decide unanimously that the internet was for the people, not for money hungry companies. you would wish more people were like this but so is the point of your end talk, it gave me hope for the future. thank you
I was very surprised while researching this, I went into it expecting to just hate on cookies. Admittedly, this is also the first time I had ever looked into it. I was also surprised how DEEP I had to go to find a lot of this stuff, like reading public chat logs from 1995, interviews with people that have only 100 views, reading newspaper articles from forever ago, like this wasn't in the Wikipedia page at all, nor in any other article I've read about them. I'm really glad people are already responding well to this video, because this has been in the works since early September haha
@rejectconvenience I am very happy i discovered your channel. you certainly put a lot of time and effort in your research and it shows in the quality of your videos, i was fascinated to see so many references and resource linked in the description of your videos, most people dont bother with such things. I wish your channel continues its upward trend, you discuss important topics that are so etched into our daily lives we simply do not bother to understand more about. The more people know about them (even if they dont do much about it) the better. your work is very valuable, and i hope it brings you value in return too.
People are awesome!
unfortunately, decisions like that are all in the past. morality was left in the last millennium.
@@rejectconvenience thanks for sticking with it! The fact there is little information easily available about the creation of something that plays such a large role in our lives online is more reason why you guys just did something important. This information should not be lost as a lot of information about the start of the internet has been. With the internet archive being under attack and losing, we are in danger of losing so much information that hasn’t been saved anywhere else not to mention what has already been lost and wasn’t archived.
Thank you guys for doing the hard work.
I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being used in things like companies' training courses for online safety. The quality of your videos was already high, but this one is though the roof
low*
@@sullenscrWhy are you here if you don't like the video?
@@sullenscr You don't need to lie.
@@JustinKoenigSilica theyre being a hater for the sake of being a hater, just ignore em and dont say anything bout them
@@JustinKoenigSilica I wanted to learn more about cookies, not about a video running at 1fps and a Mii ripoff on Blender
it’s actually insane how few advertising laws there are in the us
Well, this place runs on money, so I'm not surprised
There are tons, but the agencies to enforce are underfunded
First ammendment. The real crime was applying the bill of rights to the states.
@@OttoKreml yeah no. The First Amendment doesn't allow companies to monitor what you're doing.
@@lucyla9947 It allows advertising though.
Your editing and style is what I can only describe as “Informatively Cosy”.
Thank you for making this video.
Appreciate someone finally really having good information about online privacy
Destin from the channel “smarter every day” has a really good data privacy 3 part video series if you like that type of thing! It’s really well made, Destin does really neat work
I also recommend Techlore
8:01 Stopping the flow of the video just to shoehorn in Linux is the most Linux-fan thing ever.
Probably sitting there in his thigh high pink and white socks and a skirt, laughing at Windows users like all the other Linux fans.
Based.
Windows is still better.
“Look at those peasants, scrambling around like ants.” Ahh as break
"I use Arch and Nix, BTW"
sometimes i think about how a little joke implemented for a video probably took hours to animate, appreciate it
*Drops monitor*
That little maneuver is gonna cost us 51 years!
@@rejectconvenience
*Proceeds to T-pose out of frame when his work on Earth is done*
hours? probably seconds to get a model and a couple more seconds for everything else
1 fps video
@@sullenscrHave you ever posed a 3d model?
Sure, It _might_ be easier than fiddling with interpolation(I genuinely don't know), But it still takes a long time...
@@a.j.outlaster1222 wii mii models and other generic models on blender, who knows
When i was little i somehow came under the impression that cookies was slang for boobs. So anytime a website warned me about cookies i just thought they were warning me i may see boobs, which i thought was weird, cuz it was on SO MANY SITES. Eventually i actually stopped and thought about it and figured out that was NOT what it meant, but it took me an embarrassingly long time. I still dont know how i came under that impression.
Double O's? Spell similar... ?
Cookies
Boobies
Deleting cookies was common to prevent someone else from seeing that you had been to raunchy websites alongside deleting history.
You gotta be special
Accept all Boobs [ ]
Accept necessary Boobs [✓]
Maybe you thought it was like cooties?
IMO, a lot of sites genuinely don't need cookies
Also, blocking fingerprinting is better than nothing
eh. i would guess theres alot of really weird uses cases cookies are amazing help with.
but those are mostly for remembering the user did something while changing directory (so that the user does not need to do whatever was done again)
True. `localStorage` API can be a replacement, but it has some trade-offs (both for users and devs)
Typically, cookies don't contain actual user information or cart contents, they just a session ID, with the actual data stored server-side. Also in the early days it was pretty common for websites to put the session ID into the URL instead, and some software (such as phpBB) will still fall back to this behavior in some circumstances.
I have been binging this channel since the why data breaches happen video and just ran out ,and here you are with a new plate of content
Manmade horrors within comprehension, but outside of my willingness to stay in my head.
Would be better if it all were real cookies, internet would be an amazing place.
Its clear that your visual style and visual delivery was inspired by FUNKe and Noodle especially
Very high quality vids love it
Keep it up
Wow, really wished fingerprinting wasn't invented... who knows what they can do with my battery percentage 😰
It's been a plot from Big Battery this whole time!!
I know you're joking, but there was a whole thing a while back about your loan application being denied if you let your phone's battery drop too low on a regular basis
Oh, thats frightening D:
The glimmer of hope at the end of the video was really worth it, thank you
This rocks. I understood the basics of how cookies worked and that third-party cookies existed, but this video really broke it down in a way I could grasp. Awesome stuff.
unfortunately we have taught most of the population that being tracked in everything you do is normal so now nobody even bats an eyelid
we need more uplifting realism online instead of doomerism dominating every corner of the internet. like yeah, it sucks sometimes, but there's still plenty we can do about it, it's not 100% suck.
The Internet is 99% suck and only YOU can get it to 98%
netscape had such a wonderful and responsible team, it makes me so happy to learn about a company that cared so much about making something for the people- not greedy companies. it's very sad they went under, but i'm sure its something they can all be very proud of looking back on. this video gave me so much more respect for stuff like this, great video!!
They came back as a scam though sadly
Incredible video! Amazing graphics and the message at the end hit home. Make something you're proud of, do something you love, share your skills and help others. The WWW is free, so we should be too! Didn't think I would be getting emotional over a video about cookies but here I am.
Talking about fingerprinting, I was made identifiable as a group of mere thousands of users simply because I had British English as one of my browser's display languages.
I wonder if most British English speakers don't bother changing their browser's language from the default U.S. English, so those who do are in the minority...
@InventorZahran I think that's the case. I must have added it myself because I was frustrated with American spellcheck.
I really really love this video. Privacy is a huge deal to me. I'm a tech lead and I know first hand how much insight advertisers have into too much of our lives. I love the internet, but my perspective has shifted a LOT over the last several years. Seeing this video reminds me that there really are people that are and can make positive changes, and I love the reminder that we all have power here 😊
This was such a good video, definitely among my all-timers. Informative, complete, and also has a touch of optimism, but in a very logical way. Good stuff, I'm a fan!
I just discovered your channel and I really admire your videos! I especially appreciate the hopeful notes you bring to the table, it's kind of demoralizing sometimes seeing what the state of the internet is. It's good to remember where it all came from and that there are still a bunch of people working hard to make it less shitty. Thank you!!
I’m really glad I got recommended your video. It’s got a simplistic art style that I love seeing people use, and it helped me understand something that I really wanted to, that being cookies.
I’ll spare the story, but the long and short of it is that during my freshman year of high school I did terrible on an essay that was also about cookies, and despite wanting to know what they were and what they did, I couldn’t find a way to comprehend them.
I’m also really glad I wasn’t the only one who had a hard time finding the difference between cookies and fingerprinting. With all the hate cookies get, they are astronomically less harmful than fingerprinting is, but that’s exactly why I think couldn’t comprehend them. I wanted the cookie to be the villain so much that I assumed fingerprinting and cookies to be the same just so that I could say that they were bad. If it weren’t for your video, I don’t think I would’ve ever realized that, and now I’m motivated to try and give that essay another try and see if I can’t get it right this time.
Tldr: great video, Will definitely share it around before binging your other videos 👍🏻
I like that when I started making my own website and taking part of the web revival, these videos started appearing on my feed.
I hope more people would be aware on how crucial this movement is.
Take control of ya'll privacy and works--you deserve better.
I LOVE THE CONCLUSION OF THIS VIDEO
LIKE YOU CAN JUST *_MAKE SOMETHING_* AND THAT IS AMAZING
I’ve been watching your vids for a while and this one made me noticed i wasn’t subscribed. Really good vid pal
I’m glad I found this channel. Last night I watched your dumb phone videos and really related to them since I about a month ago just quit social media (well, aside from RUclips if you count that). Social media just wasn’t something I could really handle anymore and needed a break. This channel has got me thinking about what other tech/lifestyle rebalancing I might get up to. Thanks for the encouragement around learning about tech and learning about healthy habits when it comes to tech.
I've been seeing this video show up for two days, but gotta say, the title change drew me in. Congrats!
I got some feedback about that specifically, so I'm glad I listened :) This is why I love feedback!!
Yet another informative video. Thank you for providing this information and for providing the historical timeline that got us to where we are today with such tracking mechanisms. Keep at it, A.
You deserve a lot more than 21k subs. You got one now, call it 21.1k
dam he uploaded
Subscribed! This is more entertaining than the many online college courses I have taken. Passed them all but they're prerecorded lectures from a year or two ago. And you said it best, "Tech has always moved fast." I saw the previous vid you did that you mentioned in this one as well. Honestly web development is better done the hard way through JavaScript, PHP and SQL than the with Wixx.
Wixx is like building a house with A.I. bots. It couldn't be secure, because they'd have the data to reverse engineer the architecture.....
YOU KNOW THAT DAY IS COMING!
the little sound effects are so awesome!
Insane video. Is in my top 30 best videos i have seen (in 9-11 years in the web) insane👍.
Ayyy looks like last week was a good time for me to stumble upon your videos!
I think tech can be daunting and kind of scary for the layperson, so thank you for explaing it so calmly and concisely in your videos. Ending it on a more positive note makes me want to figure out how to make my own website!
(As someone in her 20's, yes, I am also kind of a dunce)
Why does 2:17 look suspiciously like John Super Eyepatch Wolf
*we are so back*
Been loving your videos man
I absolutely love your style and it's great to see someone put this much effort in their video (both with the animation and with the background on why cookies are even a thing)
I am a big fan of how much the movement away from convivence is becoming. People are starting to download mp3s, buy physical, pirate, or just make content that doesn't need a 24/7 internet connection.
Having more people switch to browsers like brave (and having better, more hardened defaults on Brave or Firefox) will help us all blend in better with larger numbers. If there are enough people blocking fingerprinting, we are far more anonymous in numbers.
If Chrome is forcefully removed from Google, that will make everything much more complicated
Yes, the crypto browser with the bigot for a CEO, that'll definitely save us
@@eilidhmm if you dont like up to you, but dont generalize and make vague statements. the crypto stuff is completle optional and off by default.
Brave is not the only alternative easy to set for privacy browsing, just so that people know.
@@orange-thing would you mind mentioning some?
The only channel I'll take tech advice from
Especially after his VPN video……it was the most down to earth, honest, and easy to understand explanation of VPN’s I’ve seen
You don't take tech advice from Rob Braxman Tech? 🤔
This was such a chilling video... Definitely deserves a lot more views
really liked the chill but still info dense presentation style! subscribed!
My undergrad thesis is actually about fingerprinting and I'll help us discover browser APIs that are being abused for fingerprinting out in the wild so that mitigations can be developed.
relieved to hear that, it's worrying to think about how many students are learning the opposite, making fingerprinting harder to avoid
One of them is canvas right? Usually a tool used to display cooler stuff on websites can be used to fingerprint you if I remember correctly.
@@shroomer3867yes, you're right
@@shroomer3867yep. i use canvas for drawing graphics, but it can also be used to fingerprint someone's browser
Also, ending on an incredibly positive note whilst still acknowledging a huge problem is an amazing mindset and it makes me hopeful for humanity to know that people like you exist
Liked, subscribed, and will stick around for more
Thanks, scrolling past this video made me come up with a solution to a problem i had on a site i'm making
1:22 That's a HTML 5 Doctype first available about 18 years after this simulated notepad history - you're welcome 🤣
shhh that's a secret
Well-researched, educational, great animation, interesting writing, good music. Even the comments are informative lol. Really great video.
The quality of your videos is incredible
what I learned here, is that Mozilla always were the good guys in this wretched hellscape of the silicone valley cabal.
Great video, how you don't have millions of views/subs already is a mystery to me.
advertising has ruined the entire world!
3:29 this is inaccurate. unless your provider had a carrier-grade NAT (and NATs were really new at the time anyway, and CGNATs didn't exist until 2012 i think) you would not share IP addresses with other customers. Since nearly ALL people directly connected to their modems they would get their entire range of ports and have their very own ip address. The issue is that when NATs were invented and people wanted two computers to use one modem, the server wouldn't know which one is which without a client state object.
Nice video man. You've really improved your quality! (I see the change to a grease pencil outline)
Signal uses phone numbers, which already contains some infotmation about a person. Proton is guilty of logging IPs, and probably more, and giving it to the authorities, with the latest one being a french activist in 2021, if my memory serves me right.
Not to bring the video down - the quality is superb! But there are no fully private services left. If anyone wants to be private, then they have to set up the network themselves. Briar, Matrix, and Session are fine from what I heard, but more search is needed
Signal no longer uses phone numbers. Proton didn't exactly log IPs until the swiss authorities made them for that one user (they already had info on them, this just helped them build a case) but true that they do log IPs to some extent, but this is far far far better than the alternative of logging anything and everything you do.
Matrix has it's own privacy concerns (iirc DMs could be sometimes read by owners of a domain), and briar seemingly offers nothing over competing apps other than the admittedly cool (but gimmicky) bluetooth option. You could theoretically just use simplex instead.
Anyways the goal isn't perfection, that might be impossible, the goal is to maximize privacy but not at the cost of everything else.
@@ThompYTto my knowledge, you are still required to attach a phone number to your signal account, but you are no longer required to share that number with people. You do have to turn that off explicitly, though.
Not quite the same as "not using a phone number," but miles better than it used to be.
@@kitlith it's used as a password and a bot detterent, it's not "using" it as an identifier of an account. If that was an issue then anything that uses a password would be a privacy concern according to you
It has certainly been frustrating, being one of those "paranoid" people who was aware of roughly how much was possibly being identified about me, and for ~20 years I've been "paranoid" about my personal info. The worst part, is like you said, I can still be identified through anyone I interact with, and by what information they DON'T receive from me. Thankfully I regularly try to find myself or my info online, and have been signed up to haveibeenpwned email alerts for nearly as long, and these days I can almost never find anything about me at all save a few posts from my early years on a blog I no longer have access to (and doesn't reveal any info anyway, though it does have my face) and I'd rather they have to infer than have concrete data at least.
Pretty much a local cache saved on your PC or Server
such beautiful and charming animation :,) ohh i love your channel. keep up the amazinf work
what are those sounds that play when the guy says "hello, stranger!"
It's originally from Windows 95, there was a pack of sounds called "Utopia", and this specific one is called "Asterisk" - [lý]
16:41
The thing about fingerprinting is, as hinted, that both your existence AND your inexistence are trackable. The more you attempt to hide, the darker is the shadow that you leave behind.
That is more or less why I use fingerprint scramblers (CanvasBlocker and AdNauseam) rather than fingerprint killers. Also, fingerprints don't even need to track specific aspects as cookies do. They don't need to wait for you to look up fridges in an online store to know you would want one. By knowing how long ago you bought your last fridge (say, 10 years ago) and your location (humid climate? maybe your fridge is showing rust), it can guess that you need a fridge now or soon, sell that guess to advertisers and now you get fridge ads. That goes to things the internet doesn't track either, like the possibility of you living alone (not many purchases? not much demand), how much time you spend on the internet (which can guess you are unemployed), etc. It doesn't know you, your name, or your face, but it will always know enough to sell you jobs, services and products.
Fingerprinting is SUPER sneaky. It uses "normal/simple" information to infer/guess complex information; doesn't it sound like AI? Well, this is proof that machine learning has been a thing for decades now. AI buzzwords are all the talk, but it is all smoke and mirrors, we have always been under AI vigilance that digests massive amounts of data and guess who people are.
Glad to know my browser of choice is even better than I thought. Not only is it *currently* good for privacy, but it's owned by the guys who've *been* fighting the good fight for privacy
Wow, I had no idea that AOL used a separate Internet protocol. I always thought those AOL keywords that PBS shows gave you were just a convenient shortcut for you to enter in your browser so you wouldn't have to type the full Internet address.
everybody wants my data but I keep ignoring the ads and everything they try to do to market me. also, once I'm dead all those data will be there taking dust and serving nobody
I question myself about if companies are doing something suspicious with my personal data...
0:15 “but a majority of us don’t know what they are” How sad. When I started accessing the web, anyone able to use it knew most of the details of how it worked. I imagine this is how people felt during the Industrial Revolution who grew up with the technology who then found a bunch of people using it poorly and not understanding the nuances of engineering.
Thanks for this video. I was researching myself about this topic but finding what is true and what is false has been a headache for me
Long live Web 1.0! No one can take indie websites away from us!
There are also items that falsify your fingerprint so you can mess with their silly trackers.
Every useful feature of web design and interactivity will eventually be consumed by advertising, scam artists, or hackers, which are indistinguishable from each other.
im learning how to code with java and css, and cookies are really, really helpful for development. Im currently trying to make one of my extensions (dark mode for a website) remember what value the user wanted the background to be with a slider. im using a cookie to remember where they put that slider, which i found extremely cool!
Yeah, that's the way they should be used and the intention they were created with.
Didn't stop sillicon valley from abusing it to gain info they shouldn't have, and since law moves at a turtle's pace when compared to the internet, it's not illegal to do so although very morally dubious.
This video explains how cookies are given to websites, but it doesn't explain how websites get the information for fingerprinting, as if it was immediately obvious where they get the data from. you could've explained that with a little more detail.
I wouldn't be surprised if fingerprinting were to get its own video in the future, but he didn't wanna promise that video without it already being some amount of the way through production
it's the same thing
@@CorruptedKarmaCookies and fingerprints are not the same. Fingerprints aren’t text files the website downloads to your browser. Instead, fingerprints are obtained by, for example, a website using an image to test how your hardware performs when it renders it.
Fingerprinting is possible mostly because websites have access to this information via Javascript. For example, a website needs to know the size of the screen or whether the user prefers dark or light mode, in order to decide how to display the information to the user. Therefore, the browser will provide this information to the websites.
Fingerprinting takes advantage of this kind of information to create a unique identifier.
Deadass thought this video was about the literal food cookies
A brilliant channel thanks for the algo for bringing me here
19:00
'its janky, but its mine'
man i did not realize how much of a coder i am before i heard that.
that is my sentence now thanks
another fantastic video as always . your growing follower count is definitely well earned congrats
Advertisere ruin near all they touch.
Marketing is a plague.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the importance of regulations on privacy, but this was still an excellent video nonetheless. I liked how you managed to stay optimistic too, even amidst the current almost dystopian state of tracking.
fantastic video, explained a lot to me, even though i grew up with the internet as it was happening back then (i'm 50) :)
Thanks for the video and insight, and even hopeful ending.
Just wait until you try digging into “Legitimate Interest”. That one boils my blood.
HOLY SHIT I LOVE THIS ALBUM AND ITS CD WAS ALSO ONE OF THE FIRST CDS I BOUGHT ONLINE LOOOOL
It's a historic one!!
@@rejectconvenience btw I love your videos, keep it up
Damn, this rebranding of Noodle's channel caught me off guard. He even changed his own voice.
(I'm at the end) Oh shit, Arlie. I saw those guys in concert when they opened for another band. Fuck yeah.
I just GOT here because the thumbnail mentioned stack overflow cookies.
My mom was right! Too many cookies are bad for you. :(
Sick ass video, dude. Who'dve thought that mixing Noodle's style with a narrator who didn't smoke crack would work?
The T-Pose at the end is amazing 😂
Ah, another video to remind me that we live in a dystopian hell. Mmmm, myes. More existential despair please!
Definitely info people already know, but presented well.
I'm still kinda skeptical, about "I only accept essential cookies"
Like, couldn't they still be using it, to be tracking personal data?
I mean technically they could send non-essential tracking cookies to track you if you only accept essential cookies.
However there are legal regulations around it, so doing so risks them getting sued and facing legal penalties.
Oh hey this animation style reminds me of a guy
And I’ll gladly be here for it!!
Braxton Cook's music in the background is genius
I worked at a place with one of those old box monitors running an old Windows OS (I dont remember which, 98 I think.) And boy howdy those things ARE heavy. I knew they were, but Id forgotten how much.
found a gem