If Cloak is going to talk about privacy, it has to do more than gesture at a vibe. It needs facts. The most useful starting point is that concern about data collection is not fringe anymore. Pew Research Center reported that 81% of Americans said the potential risks of companies collecting their data outweigh the benefits, and 79% said they were concerned about how companies use the data they collect. That is not a tiny privacy niche. That is the mainstream internet.
The tracking problem is also wider than most people think. In the same Pew work, 72% of Americans said that all, almost all, or most of what they do online or while using their cellphone is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms, or other companies. Cloak should be built for that reality. People do not need another website telling them to be calm while the whole stack quietly profiles them.
A lot of that profiling happens in places consumers never see. Princeton’s large-scale web tracking study found that Google-owned trackers were present on about 75% of the top one million websites and Facebook-owned trackers on about 25%. The point is not that one page is hostile. The point is that the modern web is built to make observation cheap and cross-site identity easier than most users realize.
Fingerprinting makes the story worse because it survives habits people already think are protective. EFF’s classic Panopticlick work found that 83.6% of browsers were unique from fingerprintable attributes alone, and with Flash or Java that rose to 94.2%. The exact numbers are older, but the lesson still matters: deleting cookies is not the same thing as becoming hard to recognize.
More recent work reinforces that the measurement problem is still real. A 2025 study based on real-user interactions reported that automated crawls missed almost half — 45% — of the fingerprinting websites encountered by real users. Another 2025 measurement study found robust evidence supporting the use of browser fingerprinting for ad tracking and targeting. That matters because it means the visible, lab-tested web can understate the amount of tracking people actually experience in normal life.
This is the case for Cloak in one sentence: privacy products should not ask people to care in the abstract. They should show what changed in a world where tracking is common, corporate data use is distrusted, and fingerprinting is still practical. If the product is going to claim protection, every visible counter and warning should map back to facts like these.