So, it’s probably hard to believe this, given my user name, but sometimes I want to be sober instead of wasted or possibly overdosing… I do not consider myself to be in recovery or have a drug problem, but today is a bad day, and I feel like sobriety may be a better option than the alternative.
There are generally two options when it comes to recovery from drugs. One is Narcotics Anonymous and one is Smart Recovery. The difference is Narcotics Anonymous involves “high powers” as a step, which I view as religious baloney. Since I hate religion, but also want to be sober, Smart Recovery is the main alternative.
Both of these websites have canvas fingerprint tracking in them.
This is incredibly irresponsible and selfish and dangerous and either is a result of extreme technological ignorance or just willful disregard of people visiting those sites.
Smart Recovery seems to be much worse than NA in terms of data privacy because Smart Recovery is loading up things from content delivery networks and lots of external scripts, none of which likely care about the privacy of someone not wanting to be tracked.
Yes, it’s “great” that NA and Smart Recovery can take a browser fingerprint of users and sell that to Meta who will then market this information to Rehab Facilities. (I’m not sure if that is what they do, but it wouldn’t surprise me.)
But this information also is likely getting sold somehow to data brokers and that information could end up being looked at by a variety of people, including potential employers. If a large employer is looking at a potential employee, they can and often do get detailed information from data brokers. People are incredibly naive as to how much data brokers store about people. It’s irresponsible and certainly not anonymous for these sites to track people like this, claim to be anonymous, and not even warn users prior to fingerprinting their hardware and identity.
Additionally, because na.org and smartrecovery.org are not hospitals or medical providers, this information is likely not HIPPA protected and certainly even if it were we have no way of knowing what data brokers do with these canvas profiles, which almost certainly link to real KYC canvas fingerprint profiles of naive users. And most users are naive users.
It’s also so frustrating because many of these meetings are being done on zoom, so accessing the meeting is done by going to the website and visitors or former addicts or people attending meetings are getting canvas fingerprinted every time. It’s disgusting, appalling, and another example of why it’s just better to keep an addiction secret, try to detox on your own, and try to sober up on your own and stay sober if you can.
It’s just infuriating. Thanks for reading my rant. And you can go to these sites yourself to check out the scripts in them. If I am misstating the privacy risks involved, I’d be happy to be told so.
Well I’m definitely not going to a meeting. Perhaps I can stick with coffee, although it’s pretty late for coffee?
I wish you the very best of success in your recovery efforts. It is a wise man who recognizes issues in his life, and takes steps to mitigate those issues. Much respect and solidarity. I am a recovering alcoholic of over two decades now. Sometimes when I’m at the store and wander by the alcohol isle, I think, ‘Gosh I sure am glad I don’t have to do that anymore.’ While I would never preclude anyone from consuming alcohol, the consumption of alcohol wasn’t my problem. It was that I allowed alcohol to consume me.
Onward and upward brother!
I understand the concern. I also imagine (I want to be optimistic here, maybe naively so) that most websites wants some form of analytics, probably does not code it themselves and instead of relying on aggregate data like a traffic counter of hits (maybe due to crawlers and other bad agents not respecting
robots.txt) then went with somethings fancier. Maybe that fancier tool is trying to mitigate automated traffic with fingerprint detectors.Well, one can understand and still disagree with it. I suggest contacting the administrator of such website with their concern BUT in the meantime, until they actually do act (which might be never) I suggest to start with self-defense and use dedicated tools e.g.
Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection(you can use a non-Mozilla flavor of Firefox if you prefer) or even more specificallyJShelterwith its Fingerprint Detector.
