I mainly use the internet to search Reddit (“site:reddit.com” followed by my query), shop, read articles, watch YouTube, and otherwise visit mainstream websites. In other words, I’m getting my daily dose of normie slop. I’ve been considering using Tor, but reading about the sophisticated tracking techniques used by Google and Meta (e.g., tracking pixels) has left me wondering if it’s even possible to browse with any degree of privacy on websites with their trackers.
Even if I use Tor alongside software that randomizes my keystrokes and mouse movements, I can’t fully hide my scrolling behavior. More significantly, I can’t hide my browsing behavior. That is, the sites I regularly visit; the pages I regularly visit on those sites; the order and speed in which I visit those pages; the time of day I visit those pages; the regularity with which I have multiple pages open as well as the typical content of those pages; and other behaviors I probably wouldn’t even think to consider.
For example, I could shop for a sofa through Tor. I would peruse my options and then narrow them down to a small list. Over the next few days, I would repeatedly reopen Tor and revisit the pages of my options to compare and contrast them. We can reasonably assume that this will establish a pattern of behavior that can — at the very least — be used to identify that the same person has been visiting all of these pages about sofas. Maybe my identity can’t be connected to this behavior, but the behavior has been linked to a single person.
Google and Meta presumably already have a glutton of data about me. If I continue browsing with the same patterns of behavior, then wouldn’t I eventually provide enough behavioral data for it to be connected to the data these organizations already have about me? In other words, Tor may attempt to hide me, but I’m still ultimately behaving as myself.
I’ve read that disabling JavaScript prevents a lot of the tracking I’m thinking of, but it sounds like doing that makes the internet more unpleasant to use than I’d prefer. If this is the case, then the question just becomes whether or not Tor is useful on the clearnet with JavaScript enabled.
If I’m correct that Tor can’t prevent this type of tracking (and it’s possible that I’m not!), then it would seem that there are two answers: randomize your browsing behavior or avoid these sites altogether. Truly randomizing your browsing behavior seems impossible. Avoiding these sites is possible, but the homogenization of the internet unfortunately also makes this impossible if you’d like to use the most active part of the internet.
So is there any real benefit in using Tor to browse sites with elaborate tracking techniques? Or would I merely be engaging in security theater, in which case I should just opt for a browser like Mullvad because it would at least be faster? But if Tor can’t stop these sites from tracking you, then what would Mullvad even do?
I ask all of this not as a criticism but merely to understand. As it stands, I have little understanding of this topic and would like to do whatever reasonably and realistically provides some degree of anonymity on the internet.