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1957 points apokryptein | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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theptip ◴[] No.42910331[source]
> Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones?

This is clearly adding entropy to de-anonymize users between apps, rather than to add specificity to ad bids.

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gruez ◴[] No.42910433[source]
Everything listed changes way too often to be useful for tracking. My guess is that it's for anti-fraud purposes. Someone setting up fake devices and/or device farms is likely to get similar values, which means they can be detected via ML or whatever.
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1. Groxx ◴[] No.42910447[source]
> screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones

None of those are likely to change when you navigate from one website to another, with tracking/ads disabled, which is what they want to be able to track. Otherwise they'd just use their cookies.

One device visits a site where you sell ads. A minute later, an unknown device with identical battery, volume, headphone, brightness, model number, browser version, and boot time to the second arrives on another site you run ads on. There's a pretty good chance they're related, because the odds of all those being the same plus those two sites and recent timings involved is rather low: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Plus it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough in bulk to sell.