Show HN: Your Social Media Fingerprint (maybe NSFW)

Post by ufmace » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 8:25 PM UTC

mahyarm wrote: post #93

daleharvey wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its only in testing right now, but Firefox Nightly has "Containers" so you can exactly have different "buckets" for different types of browsing - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...

What I really want is something like this and it opening containers automatically based on url sets. So going to facebook would go to the facebook set automatically and isolate facebook. But I don't have to manually open the "facebook profile" to do the switch. Same with twitter, amazon, google*, youtube, apple, etc. If you have multiple accounts, you can have the interface pop up a "choose your subcontainer" automat…

Post by drvdevd » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 8:26 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #118

zerognowl wrote: post #39

This is why I use 'browser isolation', which is a way to separate different types of surfing activity into different buckets. Currently the best way to do this in Firefox is to create multiple profiles, or in Chrome, you can simply add a different user/persona. Having one profile, or even an entire dedicated browser just for Twitter/FB ensures the login is not spilled over into other sites. If you're surfing the web…

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…

Post by Pxtl » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 8:31 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #162

Pxtl wrote: post #123

FYI, it's very NSFW in the back-end. Your browser is sending requests to obvious porn servers when you hit this link so it can test if you're logged in to them.

Tried it and... imagine my disappointment to find out it's ONLY connecting to youporn. "very NSFW" and "serverS" were overstatements.

Post by amelius » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 8:42 PM UTC

luchs wrote: post #104

amelius wrote: post #40

Shouldn't a browser not send cookies when the request comes from a different domain? That would seem like the most sensible solution to me. Unless somebody can show a caveat of course.

This is exactly what the "block third-party cookies" option does. It really should be enabled per default, possibly with a permission prompt for cases where they are useful. The interesting thing here is that third-party cookies usually allow a central site (e.g. an ad server) to track a user across many other sites. It's almost the other way around here: "other sites" can track status on a "central site".

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 8:47 PM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #167

drvdevd wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first read that it was making these requests here in the comments, my reaction was similar. But then upon reflection, I don't think there's a problem for the author here. Why? Because all I did was click the link. Meaning if I was behind a corporate firewall or the like, this sort of thing could be happening all the time and unless I was always tracing requests in my browser or via MITM or logging DNS, I'd hav…

The point I'm making is that it's not necessary to hit a porn site in order to get the point across, and there are HN users whose organizations observe and don't care for that kind of thing.