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

311–320 of 456 posts

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#311

Post by franga2000 »

koolba wrote: post #303
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A person used their relatively large platform to tell people that they don't support a crazy lunatic millionaire running the world's most powerful country? How scandalous!

In the USA, 2016 and onwards wasn't "just an election". It was something between a mildly harmful establishment candidate or a useless new face on one side, and "holy fucking shit are we actually letting this deranged wannabe monarch run for office?!?" on the other.

Give the man a break, it was (the start of) a crazy time, I'm actually surprised more creators didn't do something like this. If anything, it was barely even a political statement, more of a "hey fellow dems, go vote!" type thing.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#312

Post by naniwaduni »

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.

1357 (2014-04-18) is pretty bad.

(Bonus points for the alt-text argument being isomorphic to nothing-to-hide.)

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#313

Post by thaumasiotes »

jm4 wrote: post #294
thaumasiotes wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Judging by... a large number of websites, you make the list available in a topbar, and each language is named in itself. You don't apply one language to the entire list. Here's the first page that popped into my head as one that would probably offer multiple languages (and…

You’re looking at it with the perspective of someone who understands the language the site defaults to. Most non-native speakers have a hard time finding the link and they leave.

No, I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who has needed to use that language selector in the past. Understanding the language the site defaults to wouldn't help, because the selector doesn't use that language anyway.

> Most non-native speakers have a hard time finding the link

You might notice the colorful flag right next to it.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#314

Post by zzo38computer »

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…

This is a problem, that the software will try to guess what you mean by such things like this (it is not specific to this feature, but other features of computer programs in general; this is one specific case of that). Just because you do not want it to translate such a language (or any other langage) automatically does not necessarily mean that you can read it or that you want to request documents written in that language. Fingerprinting is not the only issue with this.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#315

Post by geocar »

dminuoso wrote: post #81
codedokode wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it hide GPU name that is exposed via WebGL/WebGPU? Does it hide internal IP address, available via WebRTC? > block all third party content It's not going to work, because the fingerprinting script can be (and is often served) from first-party domain. Also imagine if browser didn't provide drawing API for canvas (if you would have to ship your own wasm rendering library). Canvas would become useless for fingerpri…

If I infiltrate someone else’s computer, secretly run code in order to to exfiltrate data I risk prison time because objectively it seems to satisfy criminal laws over where I live. How do prosecutors in any modern country/state not charge this behavior when done by a website owner?

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "modern"

In Europe we have the GDPR which does exactly this

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#316

Post by wizzwizz4 »

capitainenemo wrote: post #195
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Firefox does pretty damn well though, especially with privacy.resistFingerprinting set to true

privacy.resistFingerprinting has potentially-unwanted side-effects, like wiping out most of your browser history (instead of the more sensible approach of just disabling purple links). I also recall something about it getting removed or nerfed, though I'm not sure whether that was a mere proposal.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#317

Post by beefnugs »

There was just a youtube video of a penetration tester showing a screencap of some hacker: they used something called "octo browser" to act like their target as they used stolen cookies to login as hacked targets.

Seems like we all need to come together and use the same technique to "we are borg, we are browsing your internet as one, tracking is futile"

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#318

Post by h33t-l4x0r »

unethical_ban wrote: post #302
scrollop wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA Don't use chrome.

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

Except I don't want to be flagged as a bot when I'm just visiting some website in my browser. (I also don't want to be flagged as a bot when I'm scraping some website with a bot).

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#319

Post by usr1106 »

yegle wrote: post #43
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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor was the ideal solution IMHO.

Ideal for what problem? Certainly not for reducing Google's data collection and improving privacy. It would only work with tons of small payment providers, but then you are back at square 1 that users need to subscribe with tons of services for just pennies.
Post reply on HN