I can’t even read this on my phone, the text is too small and the contrast is terrible
A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
111–120 of 309 posts
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#112> Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique
The set of fonts available in stock iOS is hardly going to be unique now is it?
That it is even possible to install fonts onto iOS would be news to most users.
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#113This is a great exercise, it's generally accurate on location but it's hard to express how granular they can be Identifying users through browser information. fonts? display size? processor? how unique is that really in laymans terms?
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#114* 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?
The amount of fingerprinting this page reveals pales in comparison to what actually happens in the wild
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#115This is just... silly. Everything it told me, while browsing on my iPhone, seems entirely reasonable. > Every page you have ever visited knows at least this much. Most of them know more. None of them told you. So? Why would I want the news site I'm visiting to "tell me" it knows my preferred language, that I'm using light mode, or the estimated location of my IP address...? It's not surprising that a browser which re…
Right that most of these aren't surprises individually, and right that nobody wants a permission prompt for Accept-Language. The argument isn't that you should, it's that the combination is enough to identify you across sites without your awareness, and that the wider tracking ecosystem trades on that bundle. The piece is editorial about the thing existing, not a proposal to gate every header. Reasonable to push back…
Fingerprinting has exited for a long time. But this site is specifically saying "None of them told you".
The site does seem to be implying that disclosure and consent are the issues:
> We did not ask for your location.
> Nothing about this was requested. The information arrived on its own.
> Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection. It will do this again on the next page you visit, and the one after that.
> No permission is required.
It's framing this as if browsers are maliciously volunteering information that ought to be protected, and that sites are maliciously hiding the information available to them.
It does seem to be clearly suggesting that even basic pieces of information ought to be available only upon request and that this must be disclosed to users.
You say this is "not a proposal to gate every header", but it's sure looking like something close to that to me.
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
My GPU identification is off by about a decade but it did get the brand right
Seriously. My laptop was manufactured last year, and the site identified it as a Radeon R9 200 series. That was a top-of-the-line GPU...back in 2014.
Same ID for mine. Are you running Firefox? Maybe that's a lie it tells to fingerprinters.
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#117The website is pretty & the overdramatic copy is fun, but there's much better fingerprinting demos out there. The number of data points shown here is low - there's plenty more it could be checking - & a good number of them seem to be wrong (it's only detecting one as explicitly "withheld" but I believe a few of them actually are, leading to garbled output). Needs some QA.
In short, another AI-generated slop project.
I've seen this exact UI style a dozen times now and it's always accompanied with tell-tale overly verbose, overly dramatic text.
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#118* 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?
It was much better for me. * Your socks don't match anything in the room. * The man you thought you killed in Tuscaloosa woke up and walked home an hour later and is now a chiropractor in Shreveport. * Your daughter is pregnant by the kid who trims the hedges. * Your dog is dreaming about the squirrel in the wood pile. How does it know?
This is all common knowledge, unfortunately.
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#119It seems like they know I have an iPhone with dark mode enabled, that I speak English, and that I'm in the USA (but wrong city wrong state). I am kinda unimpressed, I'm pretty sure they can get a lot more info than that.
Re: A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
#120> 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.
Hah I remember the picture of the scrotum.