this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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In the bad old days where I was forced to make spyware in exchange for a white collar paycheque, we used to make things called "supercookies" that used basically any fingerprint, storage, glitches of a browser to store a token or otherwise identify you with or without identity
We had something like 98% confidence even if you had no cookies, based on just using JS to eyeball your browser and probing it.
Not saying its a "supercookie" but the internet is funny like that. The current bleeding edge of it seems to be abusing favicon caches
Thanks for the reply. I have heard of these. After 1/6 I was going to sign up for Gab or one of those right wing social medias that was popular to see what they were saying and sharing, and on the sign in they demanded I authorize "permanent cookies," which I refused to do. Reading about them everyone else called them persistent cookies.
But after this incident I checked the cookies and firefox doesn't show any of these persistent cookies, I don't know how one would even find them and remove them if they don't show up.
I also am chagrined that PC's don't protect you from this. Like you should have to explicitly agree to such a thing, and be given tools to see what is on there, and remove them as you see fit. Just one more step into not owning our own electronics and just using it at the permission of the manufacturers and whomever else.
But reddit never did that to me before. Why would it log me in without telling me? It's still quite odd there has to be a reason, and it almost has to be a hacker or something I would think. As fantastical as that sounds.
Its not about permissions, its about giving you the occular patdown and making observations.
I don't need to know who you are, but that you're unique and heres how I tell you are you.
I can later relate that back to PII if I'm clever.
I hated working in the marketing/tracking space.