> is relatively high entropy at That is only true
if-and-only-if we pretend those 13 bits are the only identifying information being sent to Google when requesting a font. The HTTP request is almost certainly being sent to Google wrapped inside an IP protocol packet. For most[1] requests, there are
at least 24 additional bits (why 24? see: [3]) of very-identifying data in the IPv4 Source Address field. More fingerprinting can be probably done on other protocol fields, and IPv6 obviously adds an additional 96 bits. Yes, IP addresses are not unique, but ~13 bits is easily sufficient to disambiguate most hosts on a private network behind a typical NAT. Correlating the tuple {IPv4 Src Addr, x-client-data} received on a font request is trivial: it only requires a user to login to any Google webpage that includes a font request.
>> re: your [1]
A given Chrome installation may be participating in a number
of different variations (for different features) at the
same time. These fall into two categories:
Low entropy variations, which are randomized based
on a number from 0 to 7999 (13 bits) that's randomly
generated by each Chrome installation on the first run.
High entropy variations, which are randomized using
the usage statistics token for Chrome installations
that have usage statistics reporting enabled.
How many users have 'usage statistics reporting' enabled, and are there for a "High entropy variation"? Is it enabled by default and thus will only be disabled by the minority of people that know how to opt-out?
[1] Google reports[2] they currently see about a 60%/40% ratio of IPv4/IPv6.
[2] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
[3] my previous posts on this topic - re: x-client-data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23562285 re: 24-bits-per-IPv4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15167059