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Comment by diablo1 | Hacker News Reader

Define 'your' browsing history. Where I live you can buy a SIM card with cash, load it with credit and surf on a 3G/4G network, without having to register the SIM or attach your legal name to it in any way.

I can also encrypt my phone, turn on permanent incognito mode, disable Javascript, and have uBlock Origin running to stop trackers. Good luck trying to pin my legal name to a particular website visit. Then there's the fact that 3G/4G uses vague carrier-grade-NAT IPV4 addresses so countless others all share the same IP address enabling you to 'hide among the crowd' (providing the useragent is something common that many people use like Safari on an iPhone5)

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I remember listening to a podcast where some guy was describing how the FBI (I think?) had a map of the 5 most frequently contacted phone number and the average rate of contact for those numbers for all landline and cellphone users in the early 2000s.

They were able to de-anonymize burner phones by mapping what numbers they were contacting, who those numbers were contacting and who the 2nd hop numbers were contacting.

Given that this was the technology 2 decades ago, I’m going to guess that similar behavioral fingerprints have been collected for all sorts of data. I wonder if it’s possible to fingerprint someone from the frequency of the top 5 websites someone visits and the time at which they are most actively browsing a website.

Edit: I found the podcast from my notes. Episode 265 of the James Altucher Show

There was a thread a few days ago that showed it’s trivial to de-anonymize a device based on location history.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136612

> Where I live you can buy a SIM card with cash, load it with credit and surf on a 3G/4G network, without having to register the SIM or attach your legal name to it in any way.

Where is that? My experience in Europe and Thailand is that I have to sign documents and show a proof of identity.

In Europe “I’m sorry, I didn’t take my passport with me, but I remember my passport number” has had a 100% success rate for me.

So then you're committing fraud or whatever. Once again, law abiding people bear the burden while bogeyman-with-beard just gives a false number.

One of the general difficulties with the government threat actor is that law abiding people have to thread the needle of both technical protection and legal requirements.

Quoting your own true passport number is not fraud. Fraud would be supplying a fake passport number / fake passport / doctored photocopy.

I was responding to the implication that you could just give a fake number.

> So then you're committing fraud or whatever.

But how would they ever catch you?

Determine who you actually are based on the location pattern of the sim card, which they'll end up doing at automated scale since it's so easy to record a fake ID. Prosecution for just that seems unlikely, but rather selective enforcement.

I was in Croatia a few years ago and bought a SIM card at a TISAK kiosk on the beach. Similarly I’ve had my UK SIM card for three years and never had to show my ID.

Although this may have changed recently.

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