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Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#81

Post by user17843 »

danShumway wrote: post #67
user17843 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox Fingerprinting protection has nothing to do with real fingerprinting protection, and does not afffect panopticlick results in any way. It just bloocks a couple of known scripts based on the disconnect list. Of course they don't tell us in their marketing posts.

Firefox deploys two different forms of fingerprint protection: 1) blocking known fingerprinting scripts. 2) blocking underlying techniques. The second is the one people here are talking about, and it can be enabled by going to your settings and turning on resistFingerprinting. Keep in mind it will do things like normalize your time zone and decrease timer precision.

Nope. The linked mozilla blog post clearly talks about the fingerprinting settings, and the comment I replied to did not specify anything related to "blocking underlying techniques".

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#83

Post by ziddoap »

dmos62 wrote: post #80
ziddoap wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you basing this assumption on? The funny thing is, no matter how I reply to your comment I lose by default. If I say I have - you say I'm lying. If I say I haven't, your point is proven. What option do I have? Perhaps you'd like to chime in on the discussion at hand rather than speculating on my personal life.

Kiro does have a point. Not you personally, but in general the popular opinion is that Google is morally bad, while Mozilla is good. I think it would currently be very unpopular to say that Google just made some bad decisions, as in it's not actually "bad", because it would muddy the one-dimensional good-bad discourse to which most of these mainstream problems descend to. Note I'm not actually passing judgements, jus…

I concede that this is a valid outlook (which I did not gather from Kiro's comment, so thanks for clarifying).

I tried to word my comment in a way that made it clear that I believe this mentality should apply to _all_ companies, including Google, when a company makes a move in the direction of benefiting consumer privacy. I perhaps could have made that more clear in my original comment.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#85

Post by laughinghan »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #73
ggreer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can draw with different fonts and background colors, then grab the raw pixel values and hash them. The hash will be different depending on the versions of fonts installed, the OS, the GPU, the browser's text rendering algorithms, and the subpixel order/orientation of the display. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting for more info.

Thanks. I'd read the Wikipedia page, I'm just not clear why this process is allowed (or more importantly, why it can't be removed). Is there a legitimate use case for being able to read back pixels?

Literally any kind of image or photo manipulation, from an MS Paint-like webapp to Instagram-like photo filters.

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#86

Post by jammygit »

jszymborski wrote: post #11
lcao wrote: post #10

Yes, the same browser that sent the raw browsing history of a portion of users to a third party. Talk about tracking! >Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit. https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...

Damned if you disclose your responsible stewardship of user data, damned if you don't. > Less than one percent of users in Germany installing Firefox from our main download page will receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz recommendations enabled out of the box. > Cliqz does not build browsing profiles for individual users and discards the user’s IP address once the data is collected. > One of Mozilla’s core privacy…

Cliqz has an interesting privacy stance, and a decent privacy policy. I don’t know if they are trustworthy or not, but I think the bad press against them has been unfair.

Excerpt: To gain your trust we have open-sourced all of our front-end code (and hence everything that sends something from your computer). We know very few people will ever look into the code, but: you or everyone else could every time check that we’re honest. And hence we cannot hide anything.

Excerpt: History and bookmarks are always processed only locally and never sent to us

Excerpt No IP addresses collected

https://cliqz.com/en/privacy-browser

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#87

Post by abdullahkhalids »

herrvogel- wrote: post #55
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

17.62 bits on firefox, 11.0 on Tor, 17.63 on chrome. On firefox, the big contributors are HTTP headers (my native language is announced), hash of WebGl fingerprint and time zone. On Tor big contributors are hash of webGL fingerprint, screen size. On chrome, they are system fonts, hash of canvas fingerprint, user agent, and time zone. I am not too concerned about the fingerprinting in firefox since I have strict block…

> Based on the small amount of data facebook has on me ... How did you get all data, that facebook has on you?

Settings -> In list of links on the right, Your Facebook Information -> Access Your Information -> At the bottom, Information About You -> Ads

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#89

Post by tadzik_ »

> At the top left of your Firefox browser, you will see an icon that looks like an i inside a circle. Click on it and then click on Content Blocking

...did anyone figure out what the hell that is supposed to be, or look like? Why wouldn't they just put a screenshot.

Apparently they just mean the security settings and selecting Custom in those. Except it's on the right. And it's stripes, not a circle. shrug

Re: Block Fingerprinting with Firefox

#90

Post by detaro »

tadzik_ wrote: post #89

> At the top left of your Firefox browser, you will see an icon that looks like an i inside a circle. Click on it and then click on Content Blocking ...did anyone figure out what the hell that is supposed to be, or look like? Why wouldn't they just put a screenshot. Apparently they just mean the security settings and selecting Custom in those. Except it's on the right. And it's stripes, not a circle. shrug

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