Going from 32-bit Win7 to 64-bit Win7

[ToughDiamond]

@ToughDiamond
@Marie SWE
To each his/her own, whatever you deem appropriate, all is well!
Food for thought, I'd appreciate your reply/response.
Are you aware of, or know how to deal with trackers?

Thanks for the ideas you've presented I fear I may be getting rather off topic, and I gather you're not going to be around to read this reply for some time at least, but as these matters are important to anybody who doesn't want to be tracked, I guess some of the people reading this thread may be interested, as avoiding tracking is one of the main reasons for considering going for 64-bit Win7 rather than Win10, I'm happy to answer your post here, though we probably need a dedicated thread about tracking elsewhere, and I hope somebody tells me if such a thread gets set up, because I'd like to know more about the subject. And I've no objection myself to more useful posts here about tracking in general, as long as it's OK with whoever moderates the forum.
For URLs that contain tracking links, I use this extension in Firefox:
GitHub - Cimbali/CleanLinks: Converts obfuscated/nested links to genuine clean links.
I also have a few small utilities of my own that help.
I also use NoScript, and I only allow scripts that are essential to the functioning of the page (certainly not the ubiquitous Google ones, except ajax.googleapis.com which is the only Google one that seems to be of the faintest use to people). I really wish somebody would publish a whitelist / blacklist of all the existing scripts, saying whether each one is (a) useful, (b) a tracking script, and (c) a virus, but everything I've seen is only interested in viruses, and will declare tracking scripts to be "clean."

Cookies? I'm pretty sure you have at least some knowledge about these.
How about, Supercookies, Zombiecookies, or the nefarious Evercookies/UIDH tracking from within the referer header
Yes the italic bold word is spelled correctly.
If not, to links for your perusal.
What Are Supercookies? Here’s How to Remove Them Properly
What are Supercookies, Zombie Cookies, and Evercookies ...

Hmmm......that second link you posted itself contains a lot of tracking. It's just the kind of thing CleanLinks and my own utilities are designed to clean up. Judging by the look of it, I guess it came from a Google search. Kind of ironic that clicking the link to a website that explains how to avoid tracking would actually track you :roflmao:
Here's the clean version:
What are Supercookies, Zombie Cookies, and Evercookies - Make Tech Easier
The other link you posted is apparently clean.
I'll need to read those pages to see quite what they're talking about.

As for this "referer" thing, the link you posted for that is a Google search, and like I say, I never go there because they track you. This one should be safer:
referer header at DuckDuckGo

Firefox allows you to disable the referer:

Open Firefox and type “about:config” in the address bar and press “Enter“.
If prompted with a warning, select “I accept the risk!“
Find the entry that says “network.http.sendRefererHeader” and double-click on it.
Set the entry (from its default value of 2) to 0
[0 = disable referer
1 = Send the Referer header when clicking on a link, and set document.referrer for the following page.
2 = Send the Referer header when clicking on a link or loading an image.]

The problem with doing that is, some websites won't work any more, and it's annoying to have to keep switching.
One thing my self-written utilities do is to open a new Firefox page and paste the cleaned URL into the address box. It seems likely that any websites thus visited wouldn't have any tracking data about me from that approach, and I also have the option of adding junk tracking data to the URL first.

Ultimately a website can identify the computer that visited it from its IP address and from the computer's hardware profile, so I'm surprised they bother with tracking URLs which can pretty easily be thwarted, though they certainly do bother.

 

[Snick]

ToughDiamond
Yes, we are off topic subject to censor, so I'll leave it here.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. It all boils down to money. The NSA, China, Russia, etc. all have vast resourses. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc, have similar resources, may b not as nefarious but I'm sure you comprehend. I try to be an open honest person. I, as all, fail in that objective to some extent sometimes but the will remains. I haven't received a response from the admins at S. Keeping faith, religious and otherwise remains a priority.

Wishing you and everyone on SevenForums the best.

Snick/Bill

 

[Patricia Bosewe]

ToughDiamond
Yes, we are off topic subject to censor, so I'll leave it here.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. It all boils down to money. The NSA, China, Russia, etc. all have vast resourses. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc, have similar resources,
Snick/Bill

You are right.

 

[ToughDiamond]

You are right.

I agree that the rich players are the biggest problem when it comes to privacy, but when it comes to tracking via detecting hardware profiles (which I guess is the most expensive tracking method), maybe there are some anomalies - Facebook for example is wealthy but it clearly tracks people extensively via "dirty links," and as those things work on most people (because most people don't even know what they are, let alone how to clean them), why would they spend extra money on hardware profiling just to catch the informed few who are slipping through the net? Governments may be another matter of course, different business model - the most effective rebels are the very ones they most want to spy on. It gets more complicated, though, when you consider that government agencies use private companies to do their spying for them.

Hmm....to try to sum up then: I started this thread to try to answer the question of whether, as a Win7 32-bit user wishing for a more future-proof OS, I should go onto Win7 64-bit or Win10 (64-bit of course). One of the main reasons for shunning 10 is to avoid its spyware, which might make a big hole in my privacy. The question naturally arose, what does it matter if there are other holes in the bucket? Then we began examining the other holes in more detail to see if they were plugged or pluggable. The answer is, they're probably plugged to a good extent, but there's always likely to be a few leaks here and there.

On balance, it would seem crazy to use Win10 out of the box, as that would immediately sink the ship of privacy, but then it transpired that a lot (if not all) the harmful telemetry can be removed. Well, one hopes it can. Then there's Linux (presumably with no telemetry at all, pure and simple, or am I wrong about that?). And lots of confounding factors about how well various bits of legacy software can be made to run or replaced. What to do seems like an impossibly complicated decision. So I'll keep thinking and maybe ask another few specific questions if any arise that might help to clear the blocks. Meanwhile, any further information that might simplify the decision is more than welcome. And I haven't forgotten that privacy isn't the only issue in the decision.