251–258 of 258 posts
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Tried it and... imagine my disappointment to find out it's ONLY connecting to youporn. "very NSFW" and "serverS" were overstatements.
This is definitely NSFW if your workplace monitors the domains you connect to.
Or at least not for me.
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At risk of being depressing, it's worth knowing that a dedicated profiler can reconcile accounts across all of the protections you've mentioned - not just as a targeted attack, but algorithmically. There are a lot of fingerprinting tricks which transcend cookie restrictions and user profiles. The battery percent/value one will reconcile all accounts on one device (as will several other like fonts). If you log into on…
What about virtualization? It seems to me that something like Qubes might not at present protect against this (I don't know what information is available to guest/isolated domains on that system), but could be made to? One can easily lie to a browser about battery status and fonts from the OS too, for example. I guess my point is that it depends on what you view as pathological? I surmise that this is the kind of thi…
I think Qubes closes most of the low hanging fruit in this space, but completely preventing fingerprinting is very hard and there are probably ways to leak identifying info.
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I was horrified to find I'm logged in to FB with my 'common' cookie jar. At least that explains the recently increased accuracy of its targeted ads.
I only ever log in to Facebook in private browsing mode.
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ironic that youporn is included in this list considering they lost in a class action suit for very similar business practices. https://www.scribd.com/doc/44635414/Pitner-Versus-Youporn
+1 very interesting case - company never located on US soil is being sued in California for something of a peanut size comparing to what Facebook does. I know a bit off topic but I can't find how this case ended. Anyone with better Google skills??
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This only works of you have third party cookies turned on. I'm not sure about Opera, but I'm pretty sure Firefox has them off by default.
Firefox has third party cookies enabled by default, PLUS they hide the setting so you have to search for it to disable it. I'm 100% sure that they designed it that way to please Google. The pull requests to change it were ignored. And then they claim to be your partner in keeping your privacy. AFAIK only Safari has 3rd party cookies disabled by default. There are only very few sites that require 3rd party cookies. I…
Safari's "3rd party cookies disabled" behavior is not the same as the Firefox one. Firefox's blocks third-party cookies (though it's hard to tell whether it just blocks _setting_ or also blocks _sending). Safari does something where they send the in some cases, but I'm having a hard time determining which cases, possibly because they've changed behavior a few times. At one point they blocked third-party cookies, _unless_ the third-party site has previously been visited as a first-party site. What this meant in practice is that Safari wouldn't block third-party cookies for things like Facebook or Google that you probably have visited as a first party.
At this point they _may_ be doing double-keying of cookies instead (top domain and third-party domain as key, not just the third-party domain). As I said, it's a bit hard to tell from the documentation out there, which is conflicting and contradictory, and I have no time right now to go read the source. And even then they might only be doing double-keying in the "never visited as first party" case...
The point of all of which is, "blocking third party cookies" is not a well-defined thing and different browsers mean quite different things, with different web compat impact and site breakage, when they say they do it.
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but is that in itself not another signature in a fingerprint?
Not necessarily. The amount of bits needed to fingerprint somebody is substantially lowered doing this, and although you stand out by taking extra steps like this, it's substantially better than a large portion of the configurations you do see. Of course if your threat model is such that nation states are targeting you, either passively, or actively, then TOR is fitting in most cases, but TOR can prove to be overkill…
It's a tradeoff, you can overdo it and certainly end up less anonymous than before.
A bigger fingerprint might make it easier to identify you but if there are more fingerprints, there might also be more fingerprints that are exactly the same, thus being drowned by the mass.