Battery: kept back Your browser kept your battery level back. Firefox removed this API entirely in 2016, after researchers proved it could be used to track a visitor across websites without cookies, without consent. The API still exists in the specification. It was simply hidden — from you, and from any page that might ask after it. Well, at least something positive from the shit I take for not sheepling my way throu…
I got this message and I'm on Chrome, on a laptop. I tested in the console on that site and was able to get the battery level though, so I'm pretty sure their check is just broken.
> Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique Is this actually true? Because I don’t even know if I have any control over this on iOS, and if I do then I’d guess almost nobody diverges from the default?
Fair point, and you're right. On iOS the stock font set is essentially uniform across devices in the same OS version, so the "nearly unique" claim doesn't hold there. Just pushed a hedge: prose now distinguishes between desktop (where fonts accumulate via apps and OS over time, and the bundle is genuinely identifying) and iOS/Android (where it isn't, on its own). Combined with screen + GPU + language + timezone the iOS version still narrows the field, but the prose shouldn't overclaim. Thanks.
I am once again asking privacy advocates to try sounding normal for once. Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything.
> Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything. But I am the only person in this timezone in the world. It uniquely identified me!
The claim was that a site could "infer when you sleep, when you work, and when you browse because you cannot sleep." Is that not true? I know that the timing of my HN comments tells a pretty clear story about my schedule having recently looked at a histogram.
* 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?
> I'm not in that city. Same, it said Riverside but I'm in San Diego (about 100 miles away from Riverside). Of course, its just using a geolocation database for the IP address and thus reporting the location of some switching center Verizon runs and not my actual location. If you're trying to prove a point about privacy its probably best not to lead off with information that can be off by hundreds of miles while pres…
This is a real version of the critique and I've been thinking about it. The page leans on an IP-to-geo lookup that's known to be approximate (city-level on a good day, region-level often, wrong-city sometimes); accuracy isn't the point, any location, given without asking, is the point. But you're right that leading with a wrong answer gives readers permission to dismiss the whole. Considering opening with timezone instead and demoting geo to later, where it lands as "we tried, here's how close we got." Open to better suggestions.
At least in Europe the gdpr still counts, even when you don't use cookies but fingerprinting. So if you use this information you still need to disclose it and process data in accordance with the law.
In my case, the site reports "The technique is called browser fingerprinting. It is legal everywhere." It is definitely not legal in Europe, when used to track individual users. The consent pop-ups are not only about cookies.
uMatrix + NoScript personally (yes, seems silly, but I find NoScript's UI more convenient for script toggling, while liking uMatrix's fine grained controls) Did you enable firefox resist fingerprinting? Also maybe letterboxing, which I think is not enabled by that flag by default, and also helps with CSS fingerprinting.
I used to use umatrix, preferred it to ublock origin advanced mode. However, isn't umatrix unsupported?
It hasn't received updates in a good long while, but seems to work fine, for me anyway. Has some rough edges, logging blocks when there's a bunch of redirects is a bit of a pain, making it hard to fix whitelisting in complicated things (like the dozen domains microsoft uses for auth) but apart from that...
Something attacked my computer.
I shut the page, and some old one popped up.
I shut it, and they popped up again
I shut my browser, and Notepad++ was filling with
I closed Notepad++, closed every open app, and restarted.