Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

kevinboone.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 456 posts

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#181

Post by notatoad »

fragmede wrote: post #108
levocardia wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the fact that NO major content websites (NYT, substack, WSJ, ...) have settled on a PPV model is simply because they haven't thought of it? Or is it more likely that the numbers absolutely do not work?

Have any of them actually tried it though? If they have and I missed it, then I apologize, but I can't recall the NYT letting me read an article for $1 with zero friction via Apple or Google Pay or Stripe link or something. It they tried it and the numbers didn't work, that's one thing, but I don't recall that happening.

WSJ was available on blendle (pay-per-view microtransactions). Washington Post was available on scroll (monthly subscription, divided up amongst the publishers you read each month). neither service still exists.

i don't believe NYT has ever tried a pay-per-view model.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#182

Post by scrollop »

aragonite wrote: post #171

Some time ago I noticed that in Chrome, every time you click "Never translate $language", $language quietly gets added to the Accept-Language header that Chrome sends to every website! My header ended up looking like a permuted version of this: en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,de;q=0.7,ja;q=0.6 I never manually configured any of those extra languages in the browser settings. All I had done was tell Chrome not to translate…

PSA Don't use chrome.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#183

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gweinberg wrote: post #74
tetha wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but multiple yes or no questions in combination can easily yield more information than they should in a real dataset. That's the real educational point.

You seem to be confused about the difference between "less" and "more". In general a yes-no question gives less than 1 bit of information if yes and no are not equally likely. There is no way it can be expected to give more.

> There is no way it can be expected to give more.

It is indeed not possible for it to give more, because it only has a single bit answer, which by the pigeonhole principle can't give you more than one bit.

The best yes/no questions are the ones which are independent of each other and bisect the group evenly. "Are you female" is typically good because it will be approximately half the population. Then you want independent questions that bisect the population again, like "does your first name have more than the median number of letters" which should be mostly independent of the first question. Another good one is conditional questions like "are you taller than the median for your sex" since a pure height question wouldn't be independent of sex but that one is.

Whereas bad questions would be ones with highly disproportionate responses, like "do you have pink hair with black and green highlights" which might be true for someone somewhere but is going to have >99% of people answering no, or "were you born on the planet Mercury" which will be 100% no and provide zero bits of information.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#185

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

scrollop wrote: post #182
aragonite wrote: post #171

Some time ago I noticed that in Chrome, every time you click "Never translate $language", $language quietly gets added to the Accept-Language header that Chrome sends to every website! My header ended up looking like a permuted version of this: en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,de;q=0.7,ja;q=0.6 I never manually configured any of those extra languages in the browser settings. All I had done was tell Chrome not to translate…

PSA Don't use chrome.

Definitely a good STEP1, but it’s not like Firefox and Safari are finger printing secure.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#186

Post by Zarathustra30 »

beders wrote: post #126

when PayPal tells you that they already know you and don't require you to log in: that's fingerprint.com behind the scenes. There are pros/cons. It should be obvious by now that using any free service of scale is being paid for by your interactions which are made more valuable through fingerprinting. Trying to circumvent that just makes it more expensive for the rest of us.

Paypal does what? I'm sometimes nervous I only need 2 factors of authentication. 0FA seems dangerous for financial anything.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#187

Post by esseph »

fsflover wrote: post #177
aragonite wrote: post #171

Some time ago I noticed that in Chrome, every time you click "Never translate $language", $language quietly gets added to the Accept-Language header that Chrome sends to every website! My header ended up looking like a permuted version of this: en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,de;q=0.7,ja;q=0.6 I never manually configured any of those extra languages in the browser settings. All I had done was tell Chrome not to translate…

Using Chrome and caring about privacy? I thought, after Google killed uBlock Origin, it had become beyond clear these two things were incompatible, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41905368

uBlock origin just got replaced with uBlock lite for most people

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#188

Post by thetyster »

nobody42 wrote: post #184

You could test with this: https://github.com/abrahamjuliot/creepjs Does it store the data? Unknown. The best browser for protection is https://mullvad.net/en/browser because it makes the connection uniform, to better blend in.

> best

I guess that really depends on how you classify "best"

Tor is pretty good for protection. Then there's always i2P as well…

Saying one browser can protect the best is pretty hard to prove.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#189

Post by RamRodification »

0xy wrote: post #141
gruez wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The only efficient protection against fingerprinting is what Orion is doing — preventing any fingerprinter from running in the first place. Orion is the only browser on the market that comes with full first-party and third-party ad and tracking script blocking, built-in by default, making sure invasive fingerprinters never run on the page. sounds like they block "known" fingerprinting scripts and call it a day.

This makes you inherently trackable, ironically. No trace is a massive trackable attribute, since almost nobody is untraceable.

Hey look it's that invisible guy again!

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#190

Post by jorvi »

gruez wrote: post #89
codedokode wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they reliably detect fingerprinting? Did they solve the Halting Problem? Sounds fishy.

>The only efficient protection against fingerprinting is what Orion is doing — preventing any fingerprinter from running in the first place. Orion is the only browser on the market that comes with full first-party and third-party ad and tracking script blocking, built-in by default, making sure invasive fingerprinters never run on the page. sounds like they block "known" fingerprinting scripts and call it a day.

> Orion is the only browser on the market that comes with full first-party and third-party ad and tracking script blocking

I love Kagi, but that is a laughable statement. Brave has been offering ad and fingerprint blocking for years now. The reason why they don't have full first party blocking ("aggressive" mode blocking) on by default is because it tends to break things.

Post reply on HN