New research provides first evidence of the use of browser fingerprints for online tracking.
  • shneancy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    6 months ago

    i mean, yeah?

    the cookies you accept, the addons you have, hell, even the size of your monitor when you maximalise the window is a part of your browser fingerprint

    anyone who’s ever downloaded the Tor browser will know it. that browser screams at you if you try to maximalise or install addons exactly because of that

  • fubarx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    6 months ago

    They were doing this a decade ago, to help track app marketing campaigns.

    IIRC, it turned out you could get pretty close to uniquely identifying a device with permutations on only 7 attributes. The problem is if you install a plugin to return false data, it could break non-malicious websites, like running games or data visualizations.

    • qqq@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      Am I misunderstanding something? Wouldn’t that just be 7! = 5040 possibilities?

      • Evkob (they/them)@lemmy.caEnglish
        10·
        6 months ago

        You’re mistakenly assuming the attributes are binary, stuff like screen resolution, regions, languages all have many possible values to help narrow down and identify you. It really doesn’t take that many for you to be identifiable.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    6 months ago

    Mullvad has a fork of Firefox they built with TOR (the organization, it does not route over TOR network). Includes NoScript and ublock origin and works by making all browsers the same ( so long as you don’t fsck with it).

    You don’t have to use it with their VPN but that’s good, too.

    My only complaint is it doesn’t support containers. Otherwise it’s wonderful.

    https://mullvad.net/en/browser

    • Fijxu@programming.devEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      +1. Mullvad browser is the best when it comes to browse the clearnet (not Tor). Also, if anyone reading this, do not compile Mullvad browser yourself, only use the official binary from the Mullvad site (or the -bin variant if you use Arch Linux AUR) since from my testing, different compiled versions of Mullvad browsers come with different fingerprints.

      Using an optimized build from CachyOS and using it on CreepJS will give you a low amount of visits, same goes with the Flatpak build, but the binary from the Mullvad site gives around 2k views, which means that at least 2k people have the exact same fingerprint as you, but of course, it counts the people that have visited CreepJS to test their fingerprint. There is also fingerprint.com which seems to be wayyy more advanced.

  • Mwa@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    7·
    6 months ago

    This is why I use Firefox + Canvasblocker + ublock origin I try to disable Javascript if it isn’t required for functionality for the stuff am doing or I trust the site (using noscript)

  • fjordo@feddit.ukEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    I really wish there was a foolproof way of preventing fingerprinting. Disabling JavaScript unfortunately isn’t really an option, no-one builds websites with progressive enhancement in mind these days.

      • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        It’s just unrealistic to expect any size of the population to even understand what JS is, much less understand why and how it’s problematic and even beyond that, how to disable it, and even further to expect them to walk away from the 90%+ of sites using it on the web.

    • Mwa@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      Same you can try noscript but its not very effective from blocking fingerprinting from what I know