Earlier quoted context omitted.
That will just make you stand out more.
You can change the reported UA header independently of the UA you use.
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The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
261–270 of 456 posts
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had forgotten I was running Ublock origin / Privacy Badger / Ghostry so I was a bit confused with the results from that site. I think it is Ghostry that is faking the responses but I still have a pretty unique fingerprint according to https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/kcarter?aat=1
Isn't ghostry compromised? Having been bought out by an ad company?
As near as I can tell, it’s always been owned by Cliqz, who produced some privacy-focused browsers (named Dawn or Lumen) and a search engine (Tailcat) that was ultimately purchased by Brave. The whole thing is majority owned by a German media group, Hubert Burda Media, and while its missions towards increased privacy seem to be sincere, I don’t know if I’d trust them implicitly.
All that said, the main project looks to be open sourced under a GPL3 license, so distrust and verify: https://github.com/ghostery
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#263Some 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 though…
What language do you put that list in? Would you still want to show it to every visitor when you know most of them speak a particular language?
I use to do some work in this area. The first question is difficult and the second is no. We had the best results when we used various methods to detect the preferred language and then put up a language selector with a welcome message in that language. After they made a selection, it would stick on return visits.
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that there's implied consent to run arbitrary (albeit sandboxed) code when you visit a website. Moreover it's not the website causing the code to be executed, it's your browser. Otherwise if the bar is "code is being run but the user doesn't know about it", it would lead to either any type of web pages with javascript being illegal (or maybe without javascript, given that CSS turing complete), or a…
> if the bar is "code is being run but the user doesn't know about it", .. would lead to all modern electronics being illegal, not just web pages with javascript.
I guess it’s fortunate that this quote only includes a portion of the assertion they’re making. What happens when you include the rest?
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#265Earlier 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.
This is also covered in the article. I appreciated the analogy they used: You can put on a ski mask when you go to the mall, and it will conceal your identity, but you will also be instantly suspicious to everyone around you, and will likely be asked to leave most of the stores you try to visit.
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#266We can start by getting rid of (freezing) the User-Agent header. No need to make it easy.
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#267On articles like this always I see a lot of people bragging about how they’ve pimped out their browser(s) to make themselves “untrackable” (or proposals to make new ways of tracking impossible) but nobody ever brags about how lack of “tracking” has positively impacted their lives. I do block ads on the web with UBlock Origin because there’s no pay option to opt-out of it and ads ruin the experience. But I don’t give…
Is this before or after ICE became a $150B secret paramilitary beholden to a corrupt authoritarian with a large cohort of sycophantic tech billionaires?
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#268The article is missing links to one of the first fingerprint diagnostic tools, https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ , formerly called something like panopticon.net.
or don't trust the EFF!
Beyond the notion that no org should be trusted implicitly, why would the EFF specifically be untrustworthy?
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#269On articles like this always I see a lot of people bragging about how they’ve pimped out their browser(s) to make themselves “untrackable” (or proposals to make new ways of tracking impossible) but nobody ever brags about how lack of “tracking” has positively impacted their lives. I do block ads on the web with UBlock Origin because there’s no pay option to opt-out of it and ads ruin the experience. But I don’t give…
Is this before or after ICE became a $150B secret paramilitary beholden to a corrupt authoritarian with a large cohort of sycophantic tech billionaires?
I’m not an illegal immigrant so I’m not worried about it
Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
#270Some 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.
don't use the same browser regardless - the key is to compartmentalise.