Comment by godelski
10 hours ago
The announcement came with the claim about DRM. So I believe there was some "legal" issue about it. I'm also sure they didn't actually care that much.
> By contrast, tracking people on the web is a multibillion dollar industry
Of which Netflix is a part of.
> The vast majority of websites by count are not doing anything sophisticated. But some are.
And this is my point. Somewhere like fingerprint.com is trying to use all the tools available. But most places aren't. Facebook and Google? Sure, I buy that. But mentioning that many places are lazy is not the same thing. It is a game where we can't win completely and we still need to let people know that small gains are still meaningful. A major problem we face with privacy is that people feel so powerless that it is useless to fight back. But that's not true. Just because your bulletproof vest doesn't stop a missile doesn't make it useful. A bulletproof vest that only stops small caliber is still better than no vest, since most shots are small caliber. Pareto is still alive and well here.
Yes, there are plugins (e.g. widevine) that do DRM and they have/had varying browser/os compatibility.
But ultimately, Netflix is just trying to check a box in their contractual obligations, and/or prevent high-schoolers with chrome dev tools from sending movies to all their friends. They're not really interested in spending large sums of money to figure out your browsing history. It's just not relevant to their revenue stream.
>> tracking people on the web is a multibillion dollar industry
> Of which Netflix is a part of.
I was referring to businesses that do web activity tracking as their primary business. Facebook and Google's primary business is advertising, which isn't the same thing, and they control enough products that they don't actually have to do very much fingerprinting in order to target ads effectively. Most of their data, people voluntarily hand over. I was getting more at the big ecosystem of commercial tools that others can implement that do these sorts of things. e.g fingerprint.com and many others.