Test browser for web tracking – EFF • Hacker News Board

Re: Test browser for web tracking – EFF

#21

Post by specto » Mon, Nov 06, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

rkta wrote: post #19

Our tests indicate that you have you have strong protection against Web tracking. Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 191,640 tested in the past 45 days. User Agent w3m/0.5.3+git20230718 Bits of identifying information: 17.55 One in x browsers have this value: 191640.0 So I have strong protection by being basically unique? Not sure what this means.

I think it's saying, hey you tried and it's better than most

Re: Test browser for web tracking – EFF

#22

Post by jerbear4328 » Mon, Nov 06, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

crtasm wrote: post #20

themoonisachees wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't this largely been fixed? I remember reading about how the tor browser would fake its window size to be from a predefined set that's somewhat near your current window size

That's correct, if you resize the window you can see the page area switching between the predefined sizes.

Yeah, it does a pretty good job at letterboxing. It doesn't make Tor perfect, even if you wipe your identity, if you have a less common predefined size and go back to the same URL, they can probably track you as the same user, especially if combined with things like canvas fingerprinting, but if you set Tor to the safest setting, which disables JavaScript, you are completely safe.

Re: Test browser for web tracking – EFF

#23

Post by sohex » Mon, Nov 06, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

rkta wrote: post #19

Our tests indicate that you have you have strong protection against Web tracking. Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 191,640 tested in the past 45 days. User Agent w3m/0.5.3+git20230718 Bits of identifying information: 17.55 One in x browsers have this value: 191640.0 So I have strong protection by being basically unique? Not sure what this means.

I think you might have missed where it says if your browser is blocking tracking ads and invisible trackers. At least for me I got the same "strong protection" message and unique fingerprint, but it did indicate that I'm blocking both of the aforementioned.

Re: Test browser for web tracking – EFF

#24

Post by rkta » Tue, Nov 07, 2023, 7:18 AM UTC

sohex wrote: post #23

rkta wrote: post #19

Our tests indicate that you have you have strong protection against Web tracking. Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 191,640 tested in the past 45 days. User Agent w3m/0.5.3+git20230718 Bits of identifying information: 17.55 One in x browsers have this value: 191640.0 So I have strong protection by being basically unique? Not sure what this means.

I think you might have missed where it says if your browser is blocking tracking ads and invisible trackers. At least for me I got the same "strong protection" message and unique fingerprint, but it did indicate that I'm blocking both of the aforementioned.

I quoted only parts of the page. My point is, when being unique while being strongly protected, am I really protected?

Re: Test browser for web tracking – EFF

#25

Post by sohex » Tue, Nov 14, 2023, 8:45 PM UTC

rkta wrote: post #24

sohex wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might have missed where it says if your browser is blocking tracking ads and invisible trackers. At least for me I got the same "strong protection" message and unique fingerprint, but it did indicate that I'm blocking both of the aforementioned.

I quoted only parts of the page. My point is, when being unique while being strongly protected, am I really protected?

Well the question at that point is, protected from whom? Security is never a binary state, it can only be assessed relative to a given threat model. I'd say that being protected from all the sites that don't use fingerprinting scripts is certainly better than not. If fingerprinting is a concern to you though grab a factory default iPhone, should be pretty a pretty common fingerprint.