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Comment by riskeet | Hacker News Reader

The average person won’t go through even 2% of the trouble. Your self inflicted lockdown is a niche within a niche. I respect it though!

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Who cares what the average person will go through and do though? We’re each responsible for ourselves and how we choose to go about life, even if vastly differs from the general population.

Ironically, if your setup is too niche (e.g. browsing privacy configuration) you can be easily tracked, though no one will bother, but captcha's will certainly not miss you.

This is the rub, tech is able to track you based on your browser, viewport size, os, location (a vpn still has a location if you aren’t rotating) and more. I use Firefox for privacy and just that measure alone rules out 97% of internet traffic and zeros down who I am within 3%. How private am I if I default to that 3%. 1440p monitor and a half screen Firefox viewport? Now we’re building an advertising profile!

If targeted advertising is your main threat, then you are lucky to _currently_ live in a country whose government _currently_ does not consider you an enemy or potential enemy. Many people are not that lucky and many people will become unlucky despite not changing anything about themselves.

Leaking bits of individuality is one issue.

The other is that once a tech choice becomes too niche, it stops being supported:

- Technically anyone can run their own email server but from what I hear if you do, some providers will treat you as spam.

- Niche features get removed from products.

- Some niche usecases depend on legal support. Running programs on a device you own without going through a gatekeeper ("sideloading") may be required in some jurisdictions (EU, any others?) but there's nothing stopping the almost-monopolies from making it impossible elsewhere.

I mean this article is the spirit of hacker news to me.

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