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The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

kevinboone.me

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Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#221

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> There was even a proposal to reduce this surface area, but it wasn't adopted:

>> Instead of sending a full list of the users' preferred languages from browsers and letting sites figure out which language to use, we propose a language negotiation process in the browser, which means in addition to the Content-Language header, the site also needs to respond with a header indicating all languages it supports

Who thought that made sense? Show me the website that (1) is available in multiple languages, and also (2) can't display a list of languages to the user for manual selection.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#222

Post by anthk »

esseph wrote: post #187
fsflover wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's a way to enforce loading UBo in Chromium but you need to download the extension by hand (git clone it from GitHub) and load it in "developer mode" in the extension settings. Also, you need to enable some legacy options related to extensions in about:flags.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#223

Post by boxedemp »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #36

The core of the problem is that we've made this behavior of "run javascript that pulls more javascript and then run that too" the default. Stallman was right, as always.

The older I get the more I see that RMS was right about so many things.

When I was young I used to think of him as that eccentric pedantic mit guy but now I see him as a true warrior for freedom.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#224

Post by boxedemp »

lipbetfox wrote: post #88

I still haven't found a method that can fingerprint simple Firefox containers. I use automatic temporary containers as a rule, and rules for specific sites where I want to keep persistent sessions. I don't understand how temporary containers are still not a built-in Firefox feature, it seems like such a no-brainer solution for privacy.

Open question,

If you're on a VPN and using Firefox containers, is the only way to identify me to look at my mouse movement and correlate it?

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#225

Post by troupo »

doug_durham wrote: post #8

I agree with the points in the article. Fingerprinting of any kind is a major risk for personal freedom. At the same time I want to make sure that content creators are compensated for their work. Ad firms that employ fingerprinting stand between me and the content creator. That said, I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read. The ad based model provides a more streamlined approach to compe…

Showing ads doesn't require invasive and pervasive 24/7 surveilance.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#226

Post by troupo »

fragmede wrote: post #212
Neikius wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see how the discourse has been shifted here? Some of us have nothing against ads per-se. We care about tracking. How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better? In my case it does not. As the tracked ads are usually worse as they will keep advertising me things I don't need anymore. Context based ads worked fine in the past and I don't really see why they cannot. Also why does every web s…

> How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better? If you don’t want to be tracked, you shouldn’t be, but how could it not? At a very simple level, an ad targeted towards a 50 year old woman isn’t going to be the same ad to show a 14 year old boy. Different people like different things and ads targeting you as an advertising profile are going to be better than ones that aren’t. You may not like t…

A 14-year-old is unlikely to read/look at the same content as a 50-year old woman. That's how contextual advertisement works.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#227

Post by FridayoLeary »

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.

That will just make you stand out more.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#228

Post by 8fingerlouie »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #185
scrollop wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA Don't use chrome.

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

Modern Safari is pretty damned good at randomizing fingerprints with Intelligent Tracking Prevention. With IOS 26 and MacOS 26, it's enabled in both private and non private browser windows (used to be only in private mode).

All "fingerprint" tests I've run have returned good results.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#229

Post by t_mann »

What I don't get, all this data is reported by your machine - why isn't there a tool/browser fork that allows spoofing a (fairly) complete realistic profile, with some sane presets like Edge/W11/Thinkpad or Safari/macOS/M4? Is it too complex, would it break too much, or am I just unaware?

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#230

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

IshKebab wrote: post #219
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does he have a strong stance of JS in the browser? Lets see what he says on the subject. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

Ok so his issue is even more obtuse - he doesn't care about fingerprinting; he cares that not all JS code is GPL.

Did you actually read the article? It doesn't mention GPL even once.

And neither does the page on LibreJS, which is the tool he created to attempt to address the problem[1]

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/

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