Show HN: GlassBox – what the browser reveals, and how identifiable you are • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by nutsu » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

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?

uniqueness, on one way or another, does not imply you're a real person.

those systems probably don't even rely on fingerprinting for those decisions - you just can't deny someone acceess to a service because "they're unique", you're opening a can of worms.

entities that do deny access based on fingerprinting actually do it based on same fingerprints corresponding to a marked visitor (like checking behaviour and marking all subsequent visitors with that fp as bad) - but it's a headache.

what you describe usually has more to do with your IP (range, usage type, country), your useragent or added/modified headers (check any extensions that do this)

i had exactly this happen some years ago when i added a `'` in the UserAgent to test a site for SQL injection and forgot to remove it.

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

#72

Post by nijave » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

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 skeptical. Pixel 7 on Android 15 with patched Chrome incognito on T-Mobile CGNAT showing 1 in 11 billion.

The population on Earth is ~8.3 billion. I find it hard to believe it's that unique. Nothing in the data looked particularly interesting.

Maybe slightly plausible if you take into account the currently assigned IPv6 although that's largely time bound.

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

#73

Post by nijave » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 1:07 AM UTC

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?

Could be bad IP rep. Cloudflare isn't about uniqueness, it's about a reputation score. Presumably some overlap but not necessarily identical.

I started getting those more often when I moved 2 years ago and switched from Charter cable to AT&T fiber. The same hardware was transported 2 miles away...