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The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

kevinboone.me

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Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#301

Post by drnick1 »

capitainenemo wrote: post #198
drnick1 wrote: post #52

Firefox w/ the Arkenfox user.js is probably as good as it gets in terms of privacy. By default, this config burns cookies on exit, standardizes the time zone to UTC, spoofs the canvas fingerprint, and does other helpful things. Basically, it makes Firefox expose the same information as the Tor browser. In addition, I block most known advertizing/tracking domains at the DNS level (I run my own server, and use Hagezi's…

unfamiliar with the Arkenfox user.js but are any of these things that are beyond what firefox enables out of the box if you turn on privacy.resistFingerprinting ? Because what you describe seems to be all stuff it does just by flipping flag.

Arkenfox does far more than that, just look at the user.js. Among others, it spoofs the time zone, number of cores, window size and many other attributes that assist fingerprinting. It basically mimics the settings of the Tor browser.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#302

Post by unethical_ban »

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.

PSA only use Mullvad or Tails which are set up to be as bland and uniform as possible

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#303

Post by koolba »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #298
nativeit wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone wrote software that automatically surfaces the relevant XKCD comic for every article this happens under? I’d like a feature in my HN reader that sticks a red button at the bottom anytime XKCD has already made the points I’m reading.

Randal had a long career of good takes, until around 2016 when they stopped being objectively good. I’m not kidding at all, that my guess is he was doing drugs and stopped.

> Randal had a long career of good takes, until around 2016 when they stopped being objectively good.

Specifically it was at this point in 2016: https://xkcd.com/1756/

> I’m not kidding at all, that my guess is he was doing drugs and stopped.

I don’t know if he stopped or started, but something changed.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#304

Post by biztos »

michaelt wrote: post #251
1718627440 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can change the reported UA header independently of the UA you use.

If I was a fingerprinting company, I'd be cross-referencing signals between browsers for sure. If the browser header says windows but the fonts available says linux, that's a very distinctive signal. And if the UA says Chrome but some other signal says not-chrome, that's very distinctive as well.

Surely this is true, but if you’re a fingerprinting company aren’t you making so much money violating the privacy of the masses that it’s not worth your time going after the tiny set of Freedom Nerds trying to evade you?

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#305

Post by biztos »

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…

How does it determine the order?

Clearly it thinks you prefer Chinese to German. Was that correlated with the frequency of your requests on Google Translate? With your browsing history? With your shopping history?

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#306

Post by dempedempe »

ifh-hn wrote: post #247
dempedempe wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. You are fingerprinted if you disable JS and/or use a VPN. Read the article for more info.

I did but I don't think I understand how it's that bad, random IP address with JavaScript disabled is 2 data points that can't, as far as I can see, be really helpful in identifying me. Seems like you're fingerprinted anyway so the less you give the better...

Just having JS disabled narrows you down by a lot. Yeah, fingerprinters can't use a lot of their more sophisticated techniques, but they still have a lot to work with as I understand it. I'm no expert though.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#307

Post by udev4096 »

armadyl wrote: post #151
msm_ wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't get it. Tor browser alone, with no additional configuration and basic hygiene, is enough to stop any fingerprinting and tracking. The only problem is that it's too private, and tor traffic is often associated with crime, so it's sometimes blocked, notably by cloudflare. I don't use it for daily browsing, but when I want to search for something I don't want associated with me (for example, health concern…

The Tor Browser won’t effectively stop fingerprinting, if anything it makes you more unique due to the low amount of people worldwide using it, and then you add points of data by using different DNS providers, extensions etc. The Tor Browser as a privacy measure is likely no better than a normal browser with uBlock if you’re also using it like a “normal” browser, signing into the same accounts you always use etc. My…

[flagged]

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#308

Post by gagik_co »

faidit wrote: post #290
scrollop wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA Don't use chrome.

Translating pages is literally the only thing I use Chrome for. The built-in translation works way better than other browsers, even though they also use Google Translate.

The new built-in translation in Firefox works pretty well! I never need to fallback to others, although forcing it to translate has weird UX.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#309

Post by seba_dos1 »

faidit wrote: post #290
scrollop wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA Don't use chrome.

Translating pages is literally the only thing I use Chrome for. The built-in translation works way better than other browsers, even though they also use Google Translate.

Firefox does not use Google Translate and performs the translation locally, which works great for the most common languages out there. For the less common ones you still have to go to Google Translate, but IME it's definitely not worth changing the browser to Chrome over.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#310

Post by weird-eye-issue »

biztos wrote: post #304
michaelt wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was a fingerprinting company, I'd be cross-referencing signals between browsers for sure. If the browser header says windows but the fonts available says linux, that's a very distinctive signal. And if the UA says Chrome but some other signal says not-chrome, that's very distinctive as well.

Surely this is true, but if you’re a fingerprinting company aren’t you making so much money violating the privacy of the masses that it’s not worth your time going after the tiny set of Freedom Nerds trying to evade you?

They aren't specifically going after you... they just try to create a unique hash from everything they can and by doing weird things to your system you are making a truly unique hash easier
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