I've always assumed fingerprinting was already ubiquitous. I look at the absolute absurdity of tracking/fingerprinting permission dialogs on sites, stating up-front their data sharing with 'trusted partners' in the hundreds ranges (thingiverse.com with over 900, theverge.com on mobile with over 800) and find it more surprising that the default state of all clients shouldn't be to block everything by default.
Edit: for clarity, I believe anything with the ability to analyze the user environment via Javascript/etc on major sites is likely fingerprinting regardless. Blocking, environment isolation and spoofing is already necessary to mitigate this.
There's an entire sub-industry of companies doing cross device targeting and attribution.
Guess how they're doing it. It's not cookies. It's also why the GDPR is not a "cookie law" and accepting the prompts but blocking cookies is not really a substitute.
I have feeling that it is all related. When use see request to accept cookies with list of over 9000 trackers it doesn't mean that this page will have zillions of javasripts included on the page. It just means that site owners fingerprint user and process user interactions to third parties server side.
Only reason why we see this movement is because advertisers feels confident about removing third party cookies.
...thus raising the bar for privacy-preserving techniques in client side browsing. Aggressive fingerprinting arrived years ago; if we can move beyond cookies altogether and focus on it as the next issue to tackle, I would think that's a net win. Saying that we should keep 3rd part cookies alive and healthy because it will keep websites using them against users rather than fingerprinting is just throwing the majority of users who don't know to block them under the bus. Plus it still leaves the door open for even privacy-conscious users to be defeated by fingerprinting anyways if a server is keen on tracking particular individuals.
Yeah, the only way third-party cookies will block creepier fingerprinting crap is if the creepy stuff is prohibitively more expensive.
But once anyone gets a creepy fingerprinting system working, the barriers drop, and it becomes cheaper to resell the capability as a library or service.
It may offer some minor benefits in terms of enabling companies that "want to be more ethical than the competition", but that too seems like a long-shot. :p
Fingerprinting defeating technology is just the kind of thing that I wish Firefox spent its effort developing instead of reimplementing features form Chrome like tab groups.
