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Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

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Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#381

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #379
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will admit that it always made me confused as to why browser has access to detailed hardware information. I can understand OS. I can understand resolution. I can rationalize GPU. I don't understand though why it should be able to access .. well, everything about the machine. edit: It is still impressive. Even with the firefox settings on, the website was able to identify me. I am not entirely certain how I want to…

I got me on iPhone through VPN change, clear cache, private window, and reboot. I know what to think about this… I fucking hate it.

That I can relate to, but the more immediate question is whether you are willing to adjust your habits to nullify its impact. Most people would not.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#382

Post by whamlastxmas »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #364
jonhohle wrote: post #357

Until everyday people realize they’re being stalked, I don’t know what will change. I am seriously thinking about trying to go through the proposition process in my state to forbid selling of data (this should already run afoul of wiretapping laws, imho). I thought having an ad campaign that targeted subgroups very specifically and boldly might be enough drum up public interest. Something like: “Hello $name from $cit…

I will admit that it always made me confused as to why browser has access to detailed hardware information. I can understand OS. I can understand resolution. I can rationalize GPU. I don't understand though why it should be able to access .. well, everything about the machine. edit: It is still impressive. Even with the firefox settings on, the website was able to identify me. I am not entirely certain how I want to…

I would assume for more advanced browser features, like 4k video playing, that hardware information could tell the player whether your machine is capable of playing back 4k video without stuttering.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#383

Post by LeifCarrotson »

royletron wrote: post #363

I have a sort of love hate relationhip with this stuff. On the one hand, yes tracking me is bad if I am not aware, but on the other hand I work for a company that uses it's expert knowledge to help consumers purchase the right tools for them. Ideally we would like the end product to reward us for putting them in touch with the right customer that we've used our name to help land. Much like a hairdresser would recomme…

Actually valuable educational sales middlemen - making an individual aware of a tool that they didn't know existed but which solved a problem they already had - are such an infinitesimally small part of online advertising that those use cases can be completely ignored.

This isn't a situation where one rotten apple spoils the whole bunch, it's more like one good apple inadvertently was dropped into a toxic cesspool of rotten apples.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#384

Post by IX-103 »

grishka wrote: post #308
nordsieck wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think unless we lock down new APIs that aide in fingerprinting to only be accessible to WebAssembly and let people block or enable WASM theres not too much else we can do. IMO, it should be enough if incognito mode presents an identical fingerprint on everyone's browser.

It's not that easy to "present a fingerprint" without compromising the user experience. Sure, you could remove all those PWA and pretend-OS APIs and hardly anyone would notice, but what about things like viewport size and font rendering? You can't exactly hide them from a website.

For viewport, you can limit the size presented to the page to a few sizes with different aspect ratios. Browsers can simply rescale the page to the actual window size for display on the screen. That also works for font rendering.

If users decide they want pixel-perfect display, they can either resize the window to one of the allowed sizes or disable this feature for a specific page.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#385

Post by cratermoon »

GuB-42 wrote: post #186
Technotroll wrote: post #100

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…

> It also was a time where companies were paranoid into letting employees access the internet, but at the same time had abysmal security

In the early 2000s I was working at an insurance company. They used some kind of blocker in their outgoing firewall that prevented access to certain sites. At one point the blocklist included sourceforge, which threw my team's work a wrench because at the time a lot of the packages we depended on were hosted there. It took a few days to get that removed from the blocklist.

This same insurance company shut down for multiple days when a virus, I think it was ILOVEYOU, infested their email system so bad that nobody could work, and everyone (except the poor IT folks) got a long weekend. And then a while later, it happened again, but with a different virus, possibly Nimda. The company was very bad about updating its systems, and even in 2003 most users were stuck on Win95.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#387

Post by prettyStandard »

jonhohle wrote: post #357

Until everyday people realize they’re being stalked, I don’t know what will change. I am seriously thinking about trying to go through the proposition process in my state to forbid selling of data (this should already run afoul of wiretapping laws, imho). I thought having an ad campaign that targeted subgroups very specifically and boldly might be enough drum up public interest. Something like: “Hello $name from $cit…

Do it.

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#389

Post by WirelessGigabit »

cratermoon wrote: post #385
GuB-42 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It also was a time where companies were paranoid into letting employees access the internet, but at the same time had abysmal security In the early 2000s I was working at an insurance company. They used some kind of blocker in their outgoing firewall that prevented access to certain sites. At one point the blocklist included sourceforge, which threw my team's work a wrench because at the time a lot of the packages…

Company I work for still blocks SourceForge because... something bad happened 15 years ago (?).

Re: Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought

#390

Post by dylan604 »

smirgel wrote: post #251
hilbert42 wrote: post #69

Ha! I followed the instructions and went to fingerprint.com and it all 'crashed' because I had JavaScript turned off—that's my normal default setting. I have five different browsers on my smartphone and three on the PC all sans JS and none of them are Chrome. Also, normal operation is to automatically delete all cookies at session's end. My smartphone and PCs are de-googleized and firewalled and I never see ads in my…

To me this seems extremely elitist. Non-technical people deserve to have their personal data stolen because they don't know about javascript for example?

I get where you're coming from,but...

If you continue to willingly use socials like FB, TikTok, et al, your complaints about stolen personal data fall on deaf ears. Show me that you don't have those apps installed or do not visit their websites, then we can talk about being serious on deserving to not have data stolen.

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