At the Market, Everyone Knows You
Author’s Note: This article uses a declared narrative fiction—a walk through the agro-food market in Botoșani—as a metaphor for browsing the internet without protection. The market scenes are literary constructs, not journalistic accounts. The technical guide within the article is real and functional. The article was written with assistance, in accordance with the transparency policy declared on this site.
It’s a Saturday morning.
I leave the house at half past eight.
The main market in Botoșani is a twenty-minute walk away—past the town hall, down the back of the cultural centre. I’ve known the route since I was a child. I could walk it blindfolded—the puddles after the rain, the occasional whiff of diesel from a passing cart, the vendors’ voices calling out prices to no one in particular and to everyone at once.
But this morning, something is different.
At the first street corner, a man I don’t know looks up from his phone and says, “Good morning. Off to buy vegetables?”
I stop. I stare at him. I don’t recognise him.
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“You go every Saturday,” he says simply. “You usually buy tomatoes, cucumbers if they’re good, sometimes cheese from the woman at the second corner. You buy less when it’s the end of the month. It’s the end of the month now.”
I swallow hard and walk on without answering. At the next corner, a woman with a notebook in her hand greets me before I can even look at her: “We know you have high blood pressure, Mr. Petru. The woman at the cheese stall said you take it unsalted.”
At the market entrance, a man in an orange vest stops me politely: “We have a special offer on spine supplements. We know you spend a lot of time at your desk.”
I turn around and go home. I haven’t bought a thing.
This is fiction. There are no people with notebooks at the street corners of Botoșani—only a complex web of interests, but within the bounds of common sense.
But there are browsers.
And your browser, in its default configuration, does exactly what I described above—with one key difference: it does it invisibly, without warning, and sells the collected information before you even get home.
What the Market Knows About You
Before we dive into solutions, it’s worth understanding the exact mechanism. Not to scare you, but so you know what you’re up against.
When you open a browser and surf the web without protection, every website you visit leaves a cookie—a small identification file stored in your browser. So far, so ordinary. The problem isn’t the cookie itself, but what happens to it.
Advertising networks—Meta, Google, and hundreds of smaller firms—have buttons, pixels, and scripts embedded in millions of websites. A “Like” button on a news site reports your visit to Facebook, even if you haven’t opened Facebook that day. A Google Analytics pixel on a recipe site adds an entry to your advertising profile. A script on an online pharmacy site communicates with a marketing network that deduces—with surprising accuracy—that you have a health issue.
And that’s when exactly what I described in my imaginary market happens: someone you’ve never met knows you’re at the end of the month, that you have high blood pressure, that you spend a lot of time at your desk.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s the business model of the free internet.
If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product—a phrase that’s become a cliché precisely because it’s true. Shoshana Zuboff calls it surveillance capitalism and wrote a thousand pages to prove it. Cory Doctorow calls the process by which platforms degrade our experience enshittification. Yanis Varoufakis sees behind it a new digital feudalism where we are the serfs, and our data is the rent.
You don’t need to read all their books to take concrete action. You just need to understand that the market knows. And that there are ways to walk through the market without being read at every corner.
But At the Botoșani Market, They Really Do Know
I need to pause here and be honest with you, because otherwise my fiction risks seeming like a literary exaggeration without any basis in reality.
At the Botoșani market, they really do know.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
The woman at the cheese stall has known me since I was a teenager, when my mother used to bring me here on Saturdays. She knows my father has passed away. She knows I have a son. She knows—I told her once—that I spend a lot of time at my computer and that my back hurts. She knows I prefer saltier cheese, even though I should avoid salt—and when she sees me, she sets aside a piece of unsalted cheese without me asking, with a gesture so discreet that I’d have to be foolish not to understand it.
The man who sells vegetables at the far end of the market knew my father from football. Not the kind on TV—neighbourhood football, on a pitch with burnt grass behind a block of flats. When he sees me, he sometimes says, “You look just like your dad,” and I understand that he doesn’t want to continue the conversation further, that it’s a form of respect for an absence we don’t need to discuss.
The woman at the fish stall knows my son doesn’t eat fish, so she never offers me a double portion “for the boy.”
This entire network of personal knowledge exists. It’s real. And it works flawlessly precisely because no one uses it aggressively.
This is the paradox of small communities and provincial towns: deep mutual knowledge coexists with a tacitly agreed silence about it. Everyone knows something about everyone. And that’s exactly why no one says everything they know. There’s an unwritten code—a common decency of knowledge—that dictates that personal information shared in the community is for emergencies or affection, not for daily exploitation.
The woman at the cheese stall doesn’t shout across the market that I have high blood pressure. The man at the vegetable stall doesn’t announce that I’m at the end of the month when he sees me choosing more carefully. Not because they don’t know. But because it’s not done.
In real human communities, common sense is the implicit data protection mechanism.
And now comes the moment when my market fiction becomes truly dangerous—not as an image, but as a comparison:
The internet has no common sense.
Not because the people behind it are evil—some are, some aren’t. But because systems don’t have common sense by design. An advertising algorithm doesn’t decide that “it’s not done” to show you an ad for blood pressure medication while you’re reading political news. There’s no unwritten social convention to stop a tracking pixel from reporting your visit to an oncology website. No analytics script refrains out of decency.
At the Botoșani market, my personal knowledge is managed by people who have a relationship with me. They know that they know. I know that they know. And it’s this mutual transparency that creates the unwritten social contract of respectful silence.
On the internet, my personal knowledge is managed by automated systems that don’t know they know, and with which I have no relationship. There’s no reciprocity. No social contract. No silence out of respect. There’s only the systematic use of every available piece of information, at any time, for any purpose that maximises profit.
The difference isn’t between being known and being anonymous. The difference is between being known by someone with whom you share a community and a moral code, and being catalogued by a system that has neither community nor moral code.
The elders in Romanian villages have a word for the person who knows everything about everyone and uses that knowledge without discernment or restraint: flecar. Or, more harshly: limbă rea (a bad tongue).
In the real market, the flecar is socially marginalised. No one tells them anything, because everyone knows that what you tell them will reach others. The social mechanism of sanction works: destructive behaviour is punished by exclusion.
On the internet, the flecar—the tracking system—cannot be socially marginalised. It has no honour to defend. It doesn’t live in the neighbourhood. You don’t meet it at the market. It doesn’t depend on its reputation in the community to survive. On the contrary: the more it knows and the more it shares, the more valuable it becomes to those who pay for it.
This is why the technical solutions in this article are not paranoia, nor are they for users with delusions of grandeur about their own importance.
They are the rational response to the absence of common sense in digital infrastructure.
At the Botoșani market, common sense protects me for free, without me even asking.
On the internet, common sense must be installed manually.
It’s called Firefox Multi-Account Containers. Or Mullvad Browser. Or Tor. Or Qubes OS, if the stakes are high enough.
But more on that later.
First Solution: Containers—or How to Visit the Market in Disguise
I return to my fictional scenario, but this time I leave the house differently.
I have three different sets of clothes. One for buying vegetables. One for the bank in town. One for an evening stroll. The people with notebooks at the corners see me in each context, but they can’t connect the images. The one who sees me buying tomatoes doesn’t know I’m the same person who went into the bank. The one at the bank doesn’t know I’m heading to the bookshop in the evening.
My contextual identities are separate. I’m not invisible. But I’m much harder to categorise.
This is exactly what Firefox Multi-Account Containers does.
Mozilla’s official extension divides your browsing into containers—isolated boxes, each with its own set of cookies, its own session, its own digital identity. What happens in one container cannot be read by websites opened in another.
You open your work Gmail in the “Work” container and Facebook in the “Personal” one—the two don’t see, touch, or communicate with each other. You visit your bank in the “Finance” container, and not even Google knows you were there, because in that container, you’re not logged into your Google account.
Installation and First Steps
Go to addons.mozilla.org and search for “Multi-Account Containers”. The extension is free, officially from Mozilla, and installs in seconds. Right after, a small box icon appears in your browser toolbar.
On first opening, you’ll find four pre-defined containers: Personal, Work, Finance, Shopping. These are just a starting point, not a limit. You can create as many others as you like, with distinct colours and icons.
The thing that changes daily behaviour the most: automatic site allocation. Click the container icon when you’re on facebook.com, select “Always Open in…” and choose the dedicated container. From now on, every time you access Facebook, Firefox will automatically redirect you there. You can’t accidentally end up on the social network from your banking context. The rules apply themselves.
At the Market with the Shopkeeper Who Keeps Records—or What Containers Can’t Hide
I return to my fiction.
I’ve gone out in disguise, with different clothes for each context. It works. The people with notebooks can no longer connect my vegetable shopping to my bank visit.
But there’s something else.
The shopkeeper at the third corner recognises me not by my face, not by my clothes, but by my walk. She knows I have a slightly asymmetric gait—the result of a minor accident in my youth. She knows from the way I handle the goods that I’m right-handed. She knows I always check the price before touching the product.
These things don’t change, no matter what clothes I wear.
In technical terms, this is called browser fingerprinting. Websites can identify the unique configuration of your device: screen resolution, installed fonts, graphics card, active extensions, JavaScript API behaviour. The combination of these parameters creates a fingerprint that, in many cases, can uniquely identify you—even without cookies, even with containers active.
Containers isolate identities. They don’t change hardware fingerprints.
For that, you need different—or additional—tools.
Next Level: Browsers That Change Your Walk
If the shopkeeper recognises you by your walk, the solution isn’t a new set of clothes. It’s to walk differently.
Mullvad Browser is currently the most accessible answer to the fingerprinting problem for the average user. Developed in collaboration with the Tor Project, it adopts all the anti-fingerprinting techniques from Tor Browser—standardising screen resolution, blocking the Canvas API, restricting access to hardware data—but it works on the normal internet, at normal speeds.
The practical effect: all Mullvad Browser users look the same in the eyes of websites. You’re not invisible. But you’re indistinguishable from hundreds of thousands of other people using the same browser. The shopkeeper can no longer note anything useful in her notebook.
Download it from mullvad.net/browser. It’s free, open-source, and available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Brave Browser approaches the problem differently, with a mechanism called Farbling: instead of blocking access to your device’s technical parameters, it slightly and randomly modifies them for each session. Your browser transmits real data, but with added statistical noise. Your fingerprint changes constantly—no two sessions produce the same signature.
Brave is built on Chromium (the same engine as Google Chrome), so its compatibility with websites is excellent. Its “Shields” system blocks ads and trackers by default, without needing additional extensions. You can download it from brave.com.
Tor Browser remains the gold standard for maximum anonymity: traffic passes through three distinct encrypted nodes, all users look identical, and cookies are completely erased after each session. The trade-off is speed—the Onion network is slow by design. It’s not for everyday browsing. It’s for moments when the stakes are high enough that speed becomes secondary.
The Market with Glass Walls—When the Browser Isn’t Enough
I return to my fiction for the final act.
I have different clothes for each context, and I’ve learned to walk differently, to change my stride. The people with notebooks look at me and can no longer note anything useful.
But there’s one place in the market where all of this becomes irrelevant: the stall with glass walls. Everything you do there is visible from all angles. The stall is transparent by design. No matter what clothes you wear, no matter how you walk, if you stand at the glass-walled stall, you’re visible.
The glass-walled stall is your browser running on a compromised operating system. If your computer has a keylogger, spyware, or a virus monitoring traffic at the system level—all containers, all specialised browsers, all VPNs become mere ornaments. The attacker sees directly, before any browser protection can intervene.
For these scenarios, the solutions are at a different architectural level.
Windows Sandbox (available in Windows Pro and Enterprise) creates a completely isolated Windows environment via Hyper-V, which starts fresh with each use. You open the browser inside, visit what you need to visit, close the sandbox—and everything disappears. Nothing remains on the host system. It’s activated from “Turn Windows features on or off”, with no additional installation required.
Microsoft Edge Application Guard does the same thing, but directly within the Edge window: a Hyper-V container per browsing session, completely isolated from the host system. Useful if you need to regularly access resources of unknown origin without opening a separate sandbox.
Whonix is an operating system run in a virtual machine, built around a simple and elegant principle: the browser and the network are separated into two distinct virtual machines. Even if the browser is completely compromised by an exploit, the malware cannot find your real IP address—it has no access to the virtual machine that manages the network.
Qubes OS is the glass-walled stall demolished and rebuilt from reinforced concrete. Each application runs in its own isolated virtual machine at the Xen hypervisor level. If a website infects your browser instance, the virus is trapped in that compartment. You close the application, the compartment is destroyed, and the virus disappears with it. Edward Snowden has publicly recommended it. It’s not for everyone—it requires powerful hardware and patience—but for those whose risk model justifies it, there’s no comparable alternative.
Practical Guide—How to Visit the Market Differently, Starting Today
The fiction ends here. What follows are concrete steps, ordered by priority and complexity.
Step 1: Install Firefox Multi-Account Containers
(10 minutes, free, for everyone)
Go to addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/. Install it. Create three containers: Work (blue), Personal (green), Finance (orange). No more for now.
Immediately set up automatic allocation rules for:
- Your banking platform → Finance container
- Your work Gmail → Work container
- Your main social network → Personal container
From tomorrow morning, these sites will open automatically in the correct container, without you having to do anything.
Step 2: Add Facebook Container
(2 minutes, free)
A separate extension, available at addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/facebook-container/. It installs, deletes existing Meta cookies, and from now on, everything related to Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger stays trapped in its own container, isolated from the rest of your browsing. Meta pixels on news sites you read can no longer report anything back.
Step 3: Test Your Current Fingerprint
(5 minutes)
Before changing anything else, go to coveryourtracks.eff.org with your current browser. Run the test. Read the result. If it says your fingerprint is unique or nearly unique in their database—and for most Chrome or Edge users in default configuration, it will—you have confirmation that fingerprinting is a real problem for you, not just a theoretical one.
Step 4: Evaluate Mullvad Browser or Brave as Your Main Browser
(30 minutes for comparative testing)
Download Mullvad Browser from mullvad.net/browser. Run the same EFF test. Compare the results.
If the result has improved significantly and the browser works well with the sites you use daily, consider switching to it as your main browser.
If you prefer to stay on a Chromium-based browser (for better compatibility with some web apps), try Brave from brave.com. Run the test again.
Choose one. Don’t use both as your main browser—consistency matters more than accumulating tools.
Step 5: Decide If You Need Tor Browser
(Evaluation, not immediate installation)
Tor Browser isn’t for everyday browsing. Ask yourself honestly: Are there situations in my online activity where I need real anonymity—not just comfort, but serious protection? Are you protecting sources? Conducting sensitive research? Accessing information from censored regions?
If the answer is yes—even occasionally—install Tor Browser from torproject.org and use it exclusively for those situations. Don’t use it for everything: its reduced speed and incompatibility with some sites make it unsuitable for daily use.
Step 6: Use Windows Sandbox for Unknown Files and Sites
(One-time activation, Windows Pro/Enterprise only)
If you’re on Windows Pro or Enterprise, enable Windows Sandbox from “Turn Windows features on or off”. No additional installation is required. From now on, open any file received via email from an unknown source or any suspicious website in the Sandbox. Close the Sandbox afterwards, and everything disappears.
It’s the simplest system-level isolation layer available to Windows users without advanced knowledge.
Step 7: Consider Whonix or Qubes OS
(Only if your risk model justifies it)
If your online activity involves protected sources, sensitive communications, or information with real personal risk—not as a theoretical exercise, but as a reality—read the documentation at whonix.org and qubes-os.org before deciding.
Both require installation time and a learning curve. Qubes OS, in particular, requires you to completely rethink how you use your computer. But for those whose risk model justifies the investment, there’s no alternative at the same level of protection.
What Remains After You Leave the Market
I’ll end with the fiction, because it opened the article, and it deserves to close it.
If I were to walk into the market tomorrow morning with all these measures active—my containers, my anti-fingerprinting browser, my sandbox for any unverified documents—what would change at those corners with people holding notebooks?
They wouldn’t disappear. They’d still be there.
But their notebooks would be mostly empty.
The one at the first corner would know someone passed by. He wouldn’t know it was me.
The one at the second corner wouldn’t be able to connect the vegetable shopping to the bank visit, because in his mind, they’re two different people.
The woman with the comment about my blood pressure and salt intake wouldn’t know anything, because the online pharmacy I visited last week remained isolated in its container, with no communication to anything else.
And the shopkeeper who recognises me by my walk would see a slightly different gait each day—because my anti-fingerprinting browser adds enough statistical noise to prevent her from building a stable profile.
I’m not invisible. There’s no such thing as complete invisibility on today’s internet for ordinary users under real-world conditions.
But I’m vague enough to no longer matter as an individual in their database. I’m fragmented enough that the profile built about me is too imprecise to be valuable.
And that, in practice, is the difference between walking into the market and being read at every corner, and walking into the market and being left in peace.
Petru Cojocaru is the founder of ABSOLUT WEB EXPERT SRL, a web agency in Botoșani. He writes about technology, digital privacy, and online life across a network of four websites with distinct editorial registers. This article was written with assistance.