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A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

sinceyouarrived.world

141–150 of 309 posts

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#141
post #104

> 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).

> 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). Tor and similar multi-hop proxies, depending on construction, supposedly can't match source to destination IPs.

It has.. Shall we say tradeoffs.. In terms of latency mostly, but I suspect bandwidth is likely affected too

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#143
post #34

A vibe-coded EFF Cover Your Tracks. The fact this made it to front-page is spookier than its contents

exactly, it even looks like a page created by someone asked to "replicate this, non-obviously, add fancy landing page theme".

Fugly.

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#145

I 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.

It's the usual terse LLM voice that makes everything sound dramatic. Nails on a chalkboard

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#147
post #34

A 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

I think at least they're following the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064959

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#148

Perhaps this illustrates the ridiculous level to which website operators make assumptions about website visitors This phenonemon is much older than "browser fingerprinting"

Opening this page in text-only browser, i.e., no Javascript, CSS, auto-loading resources, etc., it appears to contain zero information about the visitor. Not even an IP address

https://web.archive.org/web/20260508131253if_/https://sincey...

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#149
Maybe it's just because I am old, or have worked on internet software for almost 30 years, but none of this seems surprising or even concerning?

Someone sets up a server that accepts connections to it and then someone sends a connection request to it.

There has been no agreement on anything, no expectations or rules established. No one forces the server to accept any connection request it gets, and no one forces someone to make a connection request to that server. What the server returns and what the client does with that are completely up to each side.

I feel like this agreement (or lack thereof?) works both ways. I don't think users should get mad if a website decides to use information about your connection request in anyway it chooses, but I also don't think a website should be able to get mad if I do whatever I want with the data it sends to me.

In other words, websites can choose to remember whatever they want about my IP address and my request details, and I can choose to do whatever I want with what they send back to me (i.e. I can block ads or refuse to make followup requests that the site tells me to make, and i can choose to display the response in whatever way i want to) I asked for data, they sent me data.

If I don't want them knowing stuff about me, I shouldn't send that stuff in my request. If they don't want me to have that data unless I also display ads, then they should make me agree to that before sending me the data.

Of course, I know in practice most people don't understand what their browsers are doing, and there aren't a ton of practical choices for people around what their browser sends, and the internet is no longer an optional thing for a lot of our lives. I also know that things like DDOS attacks and the like make a completely 'anything goes' setup impractical.

However, I still have this gut feeling that we shouldn't expect too much from either side when we make an internet request.

Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

#150

Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies. I looked for better websites, the EFF one[0] is informative. My browser fingerprint was unique among the visitors in the past 45 days. [0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

At least in Europe the gdpr still counts, even when you don't use cookies but fingerprinting. So if you use this information you still need to disclose it and process data in accordance with the law.

In my case, the site reports "The technique is called browser fingerprinting. It is legal everywhere."

It is definitely not legal in Europe, when used to track individual users. The consent pop-ups are not only about cookies.

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