But remember to break your social graph on occasion with a new phone number and email address, and never sharing your number or stored contacts with the social media network. not that hard just something to be conscious of.
We help companies in areas like payments/account fraud where there are constant bots / rings / account takeover attacks, and this is both good advice... and _really_ hard.
To cycle against entity resolution tools for a regular company, that'd mean things like full simultaneous reset of:
* cookies
* browser user agent
* potentially sequence of sites/services you use
* IP address/location
* linked accounts
* contact info
Even one miss/overlap can void your efforts.
The big sites have much more to work with than that, making it especially hard. Likewise, if a team takes a specific interest, there are even more correlations that can be done, e.g., behavioral analytics.
Yes absolutely, fingerprinting an individual is easy and avoiding that as a user is hard.
Social media sites (Facebook products) might drive ads based on fingerprinting but they aren't re-linking social graphs this way. Sticking with the reliability of shared phone numbers and emails (and people friending/inviting the same people and having the same name theyve seen before)
Storing contact list by any service should be illegal. You might try to not share your data, but if anyone has you on their contact list, it’s out of your hands
I wonder if Google has a backdoor API which lets group people by backup email. If one always creates an account with the previous email as a backup, the link is east to make.
That would be especially useful for censorship services across competitors: Although Google Facebook and Twitter compete, sharing the flagged accounts would allow recognizing the same user coming back with a different email address.
But remember to break your social graph on occasion with a new phone number and email address, and never sharing your number or stored contacts with the social media network. not that hard just something to be conscious of.