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

31–40 of 456 posts

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#31

Post by voakbasda »

lobsterthief wrote: post #16
Xelbair wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how about donating to the creator directly? not subscription, just occasional donations whenever people feel like it - content is more widely available, and people who really enjoy it or are well off can actually fund the development

Yes, but you need a scalable and low-friction donation solution. Patreon is the closest but it doesn’t pay the bills for most creators. Maybe some micro-tipping solution, but nobody has made that work yet.

No one has made a successful micro-tipping solution, because regulations and entrenched interests (banks, payment processors) have too much control and assess per-transaction fees that dwarf the amounts that such a system would be designed send.

Aggregation of tips and payouts would help, but that requires network effects (achievable only at scale) to be viable. I believe this approach has been tried in recent years, but I am not sure where those efforts went.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#32

Post by Bjartr »

tgv wrote: post #26
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…

They don't get $5 per month from ads. So the true subscription price must be a lot lower. One option: a fund where you buy tokens, that you can spend reading an article. That will, however, lead to more clickbait and AI slop and snowing under serious blogs with low volume.

This micro payments for content idea has been tried a few times, with slight variations. No-one has cracked the problem yet. But maybe one day

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#33

Post by myaccountonhn »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #23

I mean... I don't give a fuck about fonts, I don't give a fuck about drawing shit to some canvas. Can I not just opt out? Yes, I know that's ski-mask bla bla bla, but I still don't want my browser to be doing this nonsense.

There's the gemini protocol and gopher.

When I think of all the tracking that goes on, these are becoming more lucrative.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#34

Post by Y_Y »

lilsoso wrote: post #20

Thanks for the browser recommendations. I switched to the Mullvad browser. The other recommendation, LibreWolf, provides the following warning on install which scared me away: "Warning: librewolf has been deprecated because it does not pass the macOS Gatekeeper check! It will be disabled on 2026-09-01."

Sounds like you need to switch OS

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#38

Post by mike_d »

lilsoso wrote: post #20

Thanks for the browser recommendations. I switched to the Mullvad browser. The other recommendation, LibreWolf, provides the following warning on install which scared me away: "Warning: librewolf has been deprecated because it does not pass the macOS Gatekeeper check! It will be disabled on 2026-09-01."

The article rants about how turning off JavaScript is actually harmful because it makes you more fingerprintable, then in the same breath recommend switching to an obscure browser nobody else uses?

If you want to avoid being uniquely identifiable stick to Chrome, signed into a Google account, running on a PC from Best Buy.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#39

Post by ericd »

Bjartr wrote: post #32
tgv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't get $5 per month from ads. So the true subscription price must be a lot lower. One option: a fund where you buy tokens, that you can spend reading an article. That will, however, lead to more clickbait and AI slop and snowing under serious blogs with low volume.

This micro payments for content idea has been tried a few times, with slight variations. No-one has cracked the problem yet. But maybe one day

I know HN doesn’t love crypto, but this kind of thing seems promising for finally cracking micropayments: https://www.x402.org/

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#40

Post by tetha »

It reminds me of a game we played with students of data classification algorithms like ID3: How many yes/no questions do we need to uniquely identify everyone in this room?

With like 12 students, that's 4 bits, and it often ends up with 2-3 questions. It starts off with the obvious ones - man/woman/diverse, but then a realization comes in: An answer usually contains more information than just that one bit. If you have long hair, you're most likely a woman and/or a metalhead for example. That part will get shaken out later on.

And those thoughts make these browser fingerprinting techniques all the more scary: They contain a lot of information and that quickly cuts the possible amount of people down. Like, I'm a Linux Firefox user with a screen on the left. I wouldn't be suprised if that put me in a 5-6 digit bucket of people already.

Post reply on HN