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Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

zdnet.com

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Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#161

Post by def_true_false »

dymk wrote: post #109
oftenwrong wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some would take enhanced privacy over properly-functioning sites. I wonder how broken sites would appear if the browser simply lied about such things.

There’s like a billion side channels to determine how big the screen is unless you just want to entirely break basic css. Which is a pretty unreasonable way to address this problem.

Wouldn't loading all external links right away (think background-image) solve this? How does the site exfiltrate the gathered information without javascript or tracking pixels?

Edit: Having a bunch of html buttons/links, showing a different to agents based on their resolution and waiting to see which ones they follow would break this, unless everyone crawls a lot of stuff they don't need. Pretending to be one of a few common sizes is probably a better solution.

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#162

Post by tinus_hn »

Tsubasachan wrote: post #143

Nice but the more you want privacy the more CAPTCHA Google will throw at you.

Google isn't going to bother the general public like that, that’s limited to small groups like techs who block the canvas fingerprinting. Do you think Google is going to spam people that use the Safari default intelligent tracking protection?

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#163

Post by [deleted] »

HunOL wrote: post #160
tjpnz wrote: post #115

Why can't the ad industry just accept that there are some people out there who don't want to see ads and wouldn't click on one to begin with? Then they can honor Do Not Track and those who choose to work in adtech can start working on things that are more productive to their business.

Ads are not always for clicking. If you don't want to see ads than you should pay for content or leave.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#164

Post by tjpnz »

HunOL wrote: post #160
tjpnz wrote: post #115

Why can't the ad industry just accept that there are some people out there who don't want to see ads and wouldn't click on one to begin with? Then they can honor Do Not Track and those who choose to work in adtech can start working on things that are more productive to their business.

Ads are not always for clicking. If you don't want to see ads than you should pay for content or leave.

That's definitely true of the ones that hijack browsers and attempt to trick users into installing malware.

I have and do pay money for content. For those who don't offer that option I've got uBlock Origin as ads (alongside privacy) also present a security issue.

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#165

Post by cimmanom »

beatgammit wrote: post #82
cimmanom wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but how do you keep the client from then sending that data to the server?

You can't. Even if you block JavaScript, they can still get it from CSS media queries, where the can say which file to download given a certain screen size. The best solution is to use the same screen size as everyone else so you don't stand out. And that's what this does.

Right, that’s what I’m saying. Keeping the data client side as ggp suggests is not possible.

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#166

Post by mruts »

HunOL wrote: post #160
tjpnz wrote: post #115

Why can't the ad industry just accept that there are some people out there who don't want to see ads and wouldn't click on one to begin with? Then they can honor Do Not Track and those who choose to work in adtech can start working on things that are more productive to their business.

Ads are not always for clicking. If you don't want to see ads than you should pay for content or leave.

I’ll take the third option: blocking every single ad and making my browser as untrackable as possible.

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#167

Post by jug »

Jonnax wrote: post #120
newscracker wrote: post #37

Every time there's something about online privacy with browsers, it's mostly Firefox or Safari. I wondered if Chrome had resisting fingerprinting on its radar (guessing that it wouldn't be in Google's interests to add any feature that would thwart profiling users online), and I found this [1] confirming my guess (emphasis mine): > Since we don't believe it's feasible to provide some mode of Chrome that can truly prev…

Here's a good comparison: Android Chrome's user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; SM-G928F Build/MMB29K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Mobile Safari/537.36 Versus Android Firefox's user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 9; Mobile; rv:66.0) Gecko/66.0 Firefox/66.0 Note how the Chrome browser announces your phone model and software build version to the world. With regional models with car…

It's ironic that in a time when the browser used matters less than ever thanks to good HTML5 standard support and differences lie more in the fringe, most recent corners of the living standard, the user agent strings are more detailed than ever.

It would help if the browser vendors, particularly Google, took a step back and spent some time thinking about why user agent strings were invented. They're more like cludges to know how to present a web page, which are less needed nowadays because you can request things like mobile device dimensions, provide HiDPI resources that are only used in case they are needed, provide entirely different views depending on mobile or web, etc. All without peeking at that ugly string. Beyond that, we have polyfills and frameworks that guarantee cross-browser compatibility and minimum supported versions, again without resorting to peeking at browser engine build numbers or worse because the detections are now largely integrated in the standards themselves.

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#168

Post by maxencecornet »

patrickaljord wrote: post #156

At this point Firefox should just merge with Tor if they want to market themselves as the pro-privacy browser. Right now I just use Chrome when I'm using my real identity for work and shopping and social media anyway as it's a very good browser and supported everywhere and has an open source version through Chromium. When I need actual privacy, I just use Tor which supports most sites and is way more protective of my…

>May switch to Brave in the future

In the futur? Tor tabs are already a feature of Brave, as of today

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#169

Post by oftenwrong »

rocho wrote: post #158
oftenwrong wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I block CSS altogether on most sites with uMatrix, so I do not think it is that unreasonable.

Doesn't that make most sites unusable?

Surprisingly, most sites are perfectly usable with CSS disabled. They end up looking a bit like "motherfucking website"[1], or what you see in a text-based web browser.

[1] https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Re: Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing

#170

Post by blattimwind »

rocho wrote: post #158
oftenwrong wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I block CSS altogether on most sites with uMatrix, so I do not think it is that unreasonable.

Doesn't that make most sites unusable?

Disabling both CSS and JS actually works around usability issues on a bunch of sites ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's like reader mode, except it works on more sites.

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