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Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

zdnet.com

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Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

#111

Post by LunaSea »

axegon_ wrote: post #86

That's hardly surprising. I mean browsers hand out willingly plenty of information that could be used for pretty accurate identifications. Just scrolling through my scores on amiunique[1], many of the parameters put me in the 0.01% category. [1] https://amiunique.org/fp

A lot of these make no sense at all.

Using Mac OSX stock audio input and output devices is already supposedly "unique".

Having an Azerty keyboard supposedly puts you in the 0,04% category even though all French speakers have the same setting which means that 0,04% already represents +70M users. So far from "unique".

Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

#112

Post by heresie-dabord »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #103
curiousgal wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you know, just block JS.

Congratulations, you just broke 90% of the modern web. Might as well go directly to Gopher.

Use RSS.

The modern Web is a tracking system.

Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

#113

Post by heresie-dabord »

Tarq0n wrote: post #107
ffpip wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use LocalCDN. A fork of Decentraleyes with many more resources for cache. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/local-cdn-web...

You linked to local CDN, I think you wanted localCDN (no space).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/localcdn-fork...

Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

#114

Post by RandoHolmes »

Groxx wrote: post #24

I feel inclined to say "... well yeah, obviously". Not in the "obvious in retrospect" way, but because browsers have been progressively blocking history-sniffing tactics for years precisely because advertisers were using it to identify visitors. Did this research... establish better numbers around it or something?

It also says 50-150 websites.

I regularly visit maybe 5 or 6? The rest tend to be random links from reddit or HN, I wonder if visiting a site like that once and never again is enough to help with that identification.

Another thought is I think it's obvious that if it's a site you log into and the URL has an identifier of some type then it's easy to identify you and that's why schemes to hide the URL could also be a privacy issue.

Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

#115

Post by jeltz »

LunaSea wrote: post #111
axegon_ wrote: post #86

That's hardly surprising. I mean browsers hand out willingly plenty of information that could be used for pretty accurate identifications. Just scrolling through my scores on amiunique[1], many of the parameters put me in the 0.01% category. [1] https://amiunique.org/fp

A lot of these make no sense at all. Using Mac OSX stock audio input and output devices is already supposedly "unique". Having an Azerty keyboard supposedly puts you in the 0,04% category even though all French speakers have the same setting which means that 0,04% already represents +70M users. So far from "unique".

Presumably they ignore correlated values. Like a French IP, a French localevnd AZERTY are all very correlated.

Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

#116

Post by ffpip »

ffpip wrote: post #75
627467 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've started using decentraleyes, hoping to mitigate this issue

Use LocalCDN. A fork of Decentraleyes with many more resources for cache. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/local-cdn-web...

* Wrong link

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/localcdn-fork...

Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

#117

Post by ffpip »

Tarq0n wrote: post #107
ffpip wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use LocalCDN. A fork of Decentraleyes with many more resources for cache. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/local-cdn-web...

You linked to local CDN, I think you wanted localCDN (no space).

Thanks! Don't know how I missed it, when the extension's icon is on the toolbar itself

Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

#118

Post by James_Henry »

OskarS wrote: post #99
input_sh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to HN, where the majority reads nothing but the headline and discus how they feel about the headline.

That's nothing to do with HN, that's just how the internet works.

HN is on the internet, no? Also, HN definitely has a particularly bad headline-only problem, or maybe it just shows worse than some other places because people here have a tendency to ask really basic questions that the article clearly answers.

Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

#119

Post by tpxl »

MikusR wrote: post #63
the_jeremy wrote: post #3

Who is able to get access to my browser history? I thought it was just my ISP/VPN, which can obviously track me better in other ways.

Mozilla was sending your Firefox history to Cliqz (in Germany). And currently is sending it to Cloudflare (in US).

Got a source for that one?

Re: Mozilla research: Browsing histories are unique enough to identify users

#120

Post by jefftk »

3np wrote: post #74
jefftk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While access times cross-references and identification is still theoretically possible, it should be an entirely different game. How are you planning to handle communicating identity across sites with link decoration?

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this specifically? query params like fbclid? That could be stripped client-side, e.g. via a browser extension. There are already extensions that do this. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22386388

It sounds to me like your threat model here is that two sites (A and B) which would like to share identity, and you want to stop them? Perhaps A has identity (for example, you log in), A gives you links to B, and B runs some third-party JavaScript served from A. For example, A could be FB/Google/etc and B could be a news site. Site A can add any query parameter it wants to the outgoing link, and then parse it on B in their third-party JavaScript. If they always used the same params (ex: fbclid/gclid) it would be easy to detect and block, but if they were trying to get around the blocking it would be easy to rotate these parameters as often as they wanted because the same entity (A) controls both the producer and the consumer. Now your two identity bubbles have been joined.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

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