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Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

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Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#241

The idea of the Incognito mode is, that the website should be unable to detect that you are using the Incognito mode. There is a bug in Chorme, which I reported, but they told me they will not fix it: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=120485...

You are not detecting incognito mode but another attribute that correlates with incognito mode.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#242
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you disable JS, cause the website then can't see any of these customizations.

Except that disabling JavaScript is an anomaly all on its own. The dozens of users running without JavaScript might not be individually fingerprint able but it's still a small enough cohort that I don't know how much I'd lean on that. Figure in the user agent string and it's probably unique enough a subgroup to sell ads to.

More common than you think

https://amiunique.org/fpnojs

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's "Privacy Extension" for that, from https://labs.ripe.net/author/johanna_ullrich/ipv6-addresses-... > The IPv6 Privacy Extension is defined in RFC 4941. It is a format defining temporary addresses that change in regular time intervals; successive addresses appear unrelated to each other for outsiders and are a means of protection against address correlation. Their regular change is independent from the network…

Thanks, can you answer a couple of questions: So carriers (ISPs) still would need to do NAT, the RFC didn't seem (I skimmed) explicit? Isn't the removal of processing traffic a large part of the sell for IPv6. Also, surely the ISP can sell IP-to-user correlation lists as I assume they do now? They can presumably do it anonymously bit with some other party seeking the other part of the data that allows deobfuscation o…

The way it works is that the ISP assigns the home user's router a prefix (e.g. 64 bits). Devices on the home network pick a random address within that prefix, and regenerate it periodically, keeping the old address alive for a while too.

Only the router needs an IPv6-to-MAC-address map (it always needed that, this was no different with IPv4). The ISP just has a static route that sends all traffic matching the prefix to the router.

With this you can still easily recognize households by IPv6 prefix, but at least you cannot reliably distinguish devices within that household.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#244
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu has a lot of unique information that is readily accessible. Machine-ID in /etc being one, but there's various other items that can be used in the same way from d-bus activation, and something like 20 different other places, another large number in snap.

Websites can access machine-id?

I've heard from people I know to be scary skilled in that area that its possible through the d-bus interface. Mind you this was years ago.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#245
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Stallman just shot himself in the foot by even revealing that much. Unless a lot of people do the same thing, it's very easy to conclude that it was Richard Stallman who sent that WGET request, granted a few variables. The difficult part is perhaps tracking it back to its actual source, but I don't think Stallman is that hard to find. All this is of course extremely chilling. I'm sure a profile could be built…

I actually did exactly that a while ago. Where I worked, we didn't have internet access but we had email access, so as a workaround, I made an email server on my home machine that fetched web pages for me. A coworker took it even further and made a proxy server that automated the process so you could actually browse the web, although very slowly. Just to say that Stallman is not the only one with this idea. It was in…

In the early 2000's I was working as an analyst for a VFX studio, and I had a meeting with the CFO first thing in the morning. At some point we needed to look at something on his computer, and he responds "we'll have to wait about 15 more minutes." "Why?" I ask, and he shows me every day when he turns his computer on the browser starts producing "pop under windows" at a rate of about 10 pr second, and that lasts for about 40 minutes. Shocked, I debate with him for a bit and he says they've tried every antivirus. I shake my head. When they stop popping windows he has a program that mass closes all of them and then he goes to work, using that same computer - and for studio finances. Blew my mind.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#246
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more you customize the more unique your session becomes.

Not if you disable JS, cause the website then can't see any of these customizations.

Not if you disable JS, cause the website then can't see any of these customizations.

That's adorable. I guess you're not old enough to remember when we used to track people with things like invisible pixels. Or todays equivalent: testing CSS parameters.

Neither require JavaScript, and there are a hundred other non-JavaScript methods.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#247
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the page unnecessarily copies the image into a and then tries to upload the data from the instead of the original image. Surely there could be valid reasons for doing so? I imagine for example that: 1. It ensures the selected file is a valid image before uploading it 2. It strips meta data like GPS position from the image before uploading it 3. It could reduce the size of the image, by either scaling it down, or co…

3 sounds incredibly undesirable to me, assuming we’re dealing with a jpeg. Go through 3 or 4 rounds of that and compression starts to get pretty visible.

I've had to implement this - we have a web app used by engineers in the field where signal is often not great. We got lots of complaints about image uploads as for a typical job there would be potentially 100+ images that needed to be uploaded (multiple assets with 2 before and 2 after photos per asset).

iPhone defaults to uploading a large image which can take ages to upload. We implemented a canvas based solution which sends a base64 string representing a compressed image and reduced the upload file size by about 90%. We don't need high quality original images in the backend.

I may have missed a trick, this has been in place for a few years now but at the time I couldn't find a better solution.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#248

Using the IP address & user agent alone already gives you nearly 100 % accuracy, so the fact that they can re-identify you when these things stay identical isn't surprising at all. I tested that website as well and if you take care to rotate your IP address their re-identification rate becomes abysmal, especially if you're using a privacy-focused browser and extensions like Privacy Badger / uBlock.

And if we ever migrate to ipv6, the IP alone may be all anyone needs to fingerprint you.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#249
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because bad actors have an easy time on an actually global network. It's disturbingly hard to hold bad actors accountable, particularly if they have zero legal presence (e.g. a corporation's subsidiary) in one's jurisdiction.

Is it really that hard? I haven't seen anyone from US actually attempt any accountability - zero punishments for spam callers, zero punishments for data collectors, not even a semblance of attempt to punish data traffickers?

The thing is, there are so many layers upon layers between the end user and the bad actor that it's hard to pin down blame, and even if one succeeds to identify a bad actor, it's a shell company somewhere overseas and the money is long gone, moved off via a dozen other shell companies - and to make it worse, what may be a crime in the US/EU is perfectly legal in wherever these shell companies are set up.

The solution would be dedicated laws that hold the company at the top directly accountable for the actions of all sub-contractor layers, but these laws are rare and often hotly contested (e.g. with a German law mandating responsibility of the top-layer company for wage theft and other labor law violations [1]).

[1] https://www.ihk.de/regensburg/fachthemen/recht/arbeitsrecht/...

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#250

I don't understand the test on this page. It says we should be worried because a fingerprinting website generates the same hash even after you clear your cache and site-data, and even if you go into a private tab. But I'm not overly concerned by this, provided I share that hash with other people. The worry would be that the hash is unique to me (i.e. a fingerprint), but I don't see the evidence that it is.

The site they use give you a visits counter. So, if that matches what you did, you didn't clash with any other user's hash.
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