The text legibility of the gray on black is a serious problem. My eyes aren't that bad but I can barely read this.
My eyes aren't great and I had to pinch-zoom to read parts of this page.
A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
131–140 of 309 posts
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#132A vibe-coded EFF Cover Your Tracks. The fact this made it to front-page is spookier than its contents
Yes! By a user who’s 21 days old, has never commented and it’s not even following this thread as he has absolutely never replied and never will. Having these kind of submissions not flagged is killing hacker news
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
* That's the wrong battery percentage and the wrong charging status. > Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it? It would probably still be low contrast garbage even if it did. :/
The 100% charging readout is the desktop-with-no-battery phantom. I pushed a stricter filter for that earlier, you may be on a cached copy (try a hard refresh). On the light-mode call: the page detects your preference but doesn't honor it, intentionally. The irony being that the demo ignores the same signal it points out. I take the cost of the annoyance.
Okay but it's really hard to read for those of us with old people eyes.
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#134I am once again asking privacy advocates to try sounding normal for once. Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything.
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#135Its pretty scary when you see it like this
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#136good stuff but useful for non tech ppl. We already knew those things are exposed by the browser. probably worth putting in x/reddit
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#137> We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did. Bunk. You asked a geolocation api/service to map my ip address back to a location. You _did_ ask for my location, using my IP as a key. And my IP is pretty much required in order for communication on the internet to work (outside of using services to hide it, but then _they_ have your info instead).
I think you are misreading this. It isn't saying they didn't ask ANYONE, they are saying they never asked YOU as a user for it.
Also, though, of COURSE your address arrived first... how else are they going to send back the data you are requesting?
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#138* I'm not in that city. * It's running a kind of Chrome on a kind of Linux, at a stretch. * Nobody can infer when I work and when I sleep. That includes me. * The recent, high-end display is the screen of a low-end tablet I bought in a supermarket five years ago. * But yes, browser fingerprinting is annoying. * Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?
> I'm not in that city.
Same, it said Riverside but I'm in San Diego (about 100 miles away from Riverside).
Of course, its just using a geolocation database for the IP address and thus reporting the location of some switching center Verizon runs and not my actual location.
If you're trying to prove a point about privacy its probably best not to lead off with information that can be off by hundreds of miles while presenting the fact that it "knows" this information as being darkly ominous.
Presenting this information while being wrong probably does the opposite of the site's intent and gives some people a false sense of security because what real websites and apps track about you using digital fingerprinting is a lot more detailed, personalized and (usually) correct than what this website presents.
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#139> Your screen is 1512 by 982 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display. Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection. No it didn't. It was queried by the JS running on the page. It's a fun demo but it could really do without the slop prose.
Yeah, no need JS to track resolution or even mouse movements with timing, pure HTML/CSS can do.
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#140> Where you were before > news.ycombinator.com This has always bothered me the most. I disabled the 'Referer' header once, but it breaks many websites.
The Referer header is the one that's hardest to opt out of cleanly, strip it at the network level and too many things break. Referrer-Policy lets the origin set the rule, but the visitor doesn't get to choose. There's a quiet move toward Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin as a sane default in modern browsers but it's still origin-dictated, not visitor-dictated.
I strip/forge it with a old, probably outdated firefox extension (Referer Control.) But you still got news.ycombinator.com. How? I thought the extension was broken, but it's not.
That was actually my only surprise, everything else I was expecting.
edit: ignore this, looks like I just needed to save my preferences again. Thanks for showing me that I have been leaking my referer for some mysterious amount of time.