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Show HN: What every browser knows about you

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Re: Show HN: What every browser knows about you

#81

Post by MichaelGG »

noonat wrote: post #75
MichaelGG wrote: post #52

Not sure why battery is exposed; I guess that's the result of making browsers more like OSes. The only really annoying thing is the idiotic WebRTC settings. Their love for "data channels" with zero prompts, despite having no legitimate uses[1], ignores your proxy settings. This should be fixed. 1: I asked someone involved with WebRTC. They suggested "maybe a page wants to communicate with your fridge directly" as a s…

Multiplayer gaming is a legitimate use of data channels, but I don't see why it couldn't prompt for permission.

WebRTC folks insist prompts will confuse people and be bad. But ignoring explicit networking settings is good, somehow.

Re: Show HN: What every browser knows about you

#82

Post by mirimir »

Cshelton wrote: post #37

The social media thing is cool, I didn't know that trick of using the favicon.ico img under the login of a site to see if the image will load or not. That's pretty nifty

That's an old one. You can see browsing history, if persistent caching is enabled.

Re: Show HN: What every browser knows about you

#84

Post by msravi »

daurnimator wrote: post #74
MichaelGG wrote: post #52

Not sure why battery is exposed; I guess that's the result of making browsers more like OSes. The only really annoying thing is the idiotic WebRTC settings. Their love for "data channels" with zero prompts, despite having no legitimate uses[1], ignores your proxy settings. This should be fixed. 1: I asked someone involved with WebRTC. They suggested "maybe a page wants to communicate with your fridge directly" as a s…

There are some really cool uses of webrtc data channels. e.g. https://webtorrent.io/

Yeah, and that's also a great example of what should NOT be allowed without the user's EXPLICIT permission - simply visiting a link should not result in a torrent download!

Re: Show HN: What every browser knows about you

#86

Post by lohengramm »

daurnimator wrote: post #74
MichaelGG wrote: post #52

Not sure why battery is exposed; I guess that's the result of making browsers more like OSes. The only really annoying thing is the idiotic WebRTC settings. Their love for "data channels" with zero prompts, despite having no legitimate uses[1], ignores your proxy settings. This should be fixed. 1: I asked someone involved with WebRTC. They suggested "maybe a page wants to communicate with your fridge directly" as a s…

There are some really cool uses of webrtc data channels. e.g. https://webtorrent.io/

To know that arbitrary netcode can run silently on the background of my browser is really surprising. And not in a good way.

Re: Show HN: What every browser knows about you

#87

Post by stephenr »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #63
yeukhon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Safari is so strict, but I wonder if that's because Safari is (my assumption) a less fat browser after all.

And that's why so many sites break with it.

When the parts that break are leaking user hardware and network information, I'll take the break thanks.

Re: Show HN: What every browser knows about you

#88

Post by freditup »

Surprised the website didn't list installed fonts anywhere. Fonts, alongside with other device details, can be a great way to fingerprint a browser/user.

Edit: Actually, I believe you need Flash or a Java applet to actually get a list of fonts installed. But you can do other, slow, iterative approaches via JS.

Re: Show HN: What every browser knows about you

#89

Post by stephenr »

So, literally all this said was:

- "MacIntel"

- some stuff from my User Agent string (changing it to IE11 made it think I'm on Windows 8)

- my public IP, network provider and approx. downstream speed.

I don't use Facebook or Google so I don't know if those things would have worked.

None of the network scanning worked, it didn't use the geolocation stuff, etc.

If Chrome/Firefox/IE do allow access to all/some of those things without prompting, jesus titty fucking christ.

All of you claiming "Safari is the new IE6" need to perhaps pay attention.

Google has a vested interest in pushing browser technologies regardless the cost to privacy or user security - their ChromeOS devices depend on a world where web apps can do everything.

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