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Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are

glassbox.codecanary.org

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Re: Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are

#51

Post by gruez »

keito wrote: post #34
dylan604 wrote: post #6

If your ISP issues an IPv6 address, isn't that pretty much game over for anonymity/uniqueness?

Not usually, if you're comparing it to IPv4. Many ISPs give each customer a persistent IPv4 address that doesn't tend to change over time. Because most people use NAT (internal IP address != external IP address), a server you connect to can't identify the specific computer or device. With IPv6, it's true that in many cases servers will see you as connecting from the specific IPv6 address of your computer/device. Howe…

>But in most OSes the right part is randomly generated and changes on some cadence (e.g. daily).

>So in many cases, the ability for a server to individually fingerprint your device solely based on the IP address is roughly equivalent between IPv4 and IPv6.

That still makes ipv6 strictly worse, if you consider that a device is always uniquely identifiable at any given time, whereas with ipv4 NAT they can't be individually identified.

Re: Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are

#52

Post by antonvs »

DavidD wrote: post #2

I built this after a thread here about Alibaba using an audio-context trick to fingerprint visitors. I knew a fair number of fingerprinting methods but not that one, and I wanted to see all of them in one place, running against my own browser. GlassBox runs ~31 probes (canvas, WebGL/WebGPU, audio, fonts, the WASM feature set, math/engine quirks, WebRTC IP, timezone/locale, the permission and API matrices, an incognit…

You even used an LLM to write your comment.

If you’re ESL, that’s not an excuse. You can write something in your own language and use a translator or even an LLM to translate it.

But using an LLM to write is delegating your cognition to a machine. At that point, you’re acknowledging that your own cognition has no value, so why are you trying to inflict a faked version of it on the rest of us?

Re: Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are

#53

Post by dullcrisp »

dd8601fn wrote: post #3

This doesn’t seem right. 1 in 6.2 billion for Firefox on an iphone, not including ip/network uniqueness? Seems more plausible that anti-fingerprinting is throwing it off?

Also 1 in 6.2 billion for Safari on an iPhone. Also the explanation on the bottom is very small and AI generated.

Re: Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are

#54

Post by tom_ »

strbean wrote: post #16

Cool tool, but the language is painfully characteristic of AI. Maybe we are collectively getting over caring about that, but if not, it's worth a pass of "make this sound a little less like AI." E.g., the guide page ends with > The honest bottom line. Perfect anonymity [...]

I was >60% sure it would be AI given the combination of calendar year and the wording "what the browser reveals" that I saw on the HN front page - and only when I clicked did I realise how wrong I was, because the actual probability is 100%.

(Not to suggest that browser fingerprinting isn't a useful issue to highlight.)

Re: Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are

#55

Post by thenthenthen »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #27

Also see https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

“ Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 311,902 tested in the past 45 days.” yet every cloudflare protected website blocks me, random human checks and also my bank and government is blocked. Mmmmm grain of salt?

Re: Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are

#57

Post by DavidD »

Retr0id wrote: post #28
saaaaaam wrote: post #22

Pretty sure someone else also promoted Claude to make something like this and posted it a few weeks back.

Recently discussed prompts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48727059 [flagged] What any website can see about you https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062178 A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182352 Show HN: Modern Browsers Don't Need the Cookie Anymore https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46517654 [flagged] Show HN: DevicePrint – dev…

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Re: Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are

#58

Post by zamadatix »

thenthenthen wrote: post #55
gregsadetsky wrote: post #27

Also see https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

“ Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 311,902 tested in the past 45 days.” yet every cloudflare protected website blocks me, random human checks and also my bank and government is blocked. Mmmmm grain of salt?

I think you have it backwards - Cloudflare et al would want to allow the typical user and block the oddballs.

That said, it's a further misunderstanding with utilizing such tools in general. Unique is neither good nor bad on its own. The next question is "always the same unique because that's all you share or always unique because certain fingerprintable attributes are randomized over time/visits/sessions". I.e. it's a war between trying to fake an average enough fingerprint and trying to track someone through partial matches, not just a matter of "is the fingerprint unique".

Re: Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are

#59

Post by Semaphor »

So it tells me I’m unique and it can track me across different browsers. It also tells me that in a different browser with a different fingerprint. Even private browsing shows more unique fingerprints that are completely different. I don’t think this site is very useful except looking at fancy data.

Re: Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are

#60

Post by queenkjuul »

Well I'll following basically every step of the provided guide (more or less bog standard Firefox on a Pixel with strict tracking protection) and then it says 91℅ identifiable. A lot of the information towards the bottom doesn't make sense and the Claude slop fails to clarify it. I wish this actually made it clear what it is here that's uniquely identifying, because surely every other pixel is reporting the same screen and gpu and whatnot.
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