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

381–390 of 456 posts

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#381

Post by baxuz »

tzury wrote: post #348

The OP argues that fingerprinting is a "privacy nightmare," but we need to look at why it exists. From a pragmatic perspective, we are forcing two very different networks to run on the same protocols: The Business Internet: Banking, SaaS, and VC-funded content (Meta/Google). The Fun Internet: Hobby blogs, Lego fan sites, and the "GeoCities" spirit. You cannot have a functioning "Business Internet" without identity ve…

Not only that, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to get to legitimate data advanced web apps need in order to work properly, or to get legitimate analytics.

Everything is obfuscated. And this is not the situation on iOS and Android.

I am working on multiple products which use webassembly and cameras on mobile devices. It's impossible to reliably know how many workers to spin up, what's the safe memory limit and how much memory the device has, which compile-time optimized bundle to load, which camera to select for ideal focus lengths...

Especially on iOS.

And I often get customer complaints that the product is crashing. Eventually it ends up being a single (iPhone) that needs a restart to stop it from aggressively managing memory in Safari. Fingerprinting a device would solve SO MANY issues. And this is, again, possible on native apps.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#383

Post by echelon »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #309
faidit wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ditching Chrome is something we need to teach everyone.

The DOJ is totally spineless and refuses to squash Google's absurd monopoly on the internet. We are literally the last line of defense, even though we really don't amount to much.

Perhaps we could start a grassroots movement.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#384

Post by shevy-java »

We really need a browser (or several) that aren't effectively controlled by private interests (such as corporations).

Basically they are used as spy-tools. Many anti-features are pushed into them - a simple example is the disable-right-click functionality. I do understand that some of this have a useful functionality (for instance during an exam on-campus-site, to restrict what the students may do), but I always hate that I need e. g. a browser extension just to disable this antifeature. That's a super-simple example; there are many more severe examples such as fingerprint spy-sniffing here.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#385

Post by ivanjermakov »

shevy-java wrote: post #384

We really need a browser (or several) that aren't effectively controlled by private interests (such as corporations). Basically they are used as spy-tools. Many anti-features are pushed into them - a simple example is the disable-right-click functionality. I do understand that some of this have a useful functionality (for instance during an exam on-campus-site, to restrict what the students may do), but I always hate…

> a simple example is the disable-right-click functionality

This is a part of a W3C browser spec and every web browser has to implement it. But you're right that people writing the spec work for companies selling web browsers.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#386

Post by IgorPartola »

echelon wrote: post #383
seba_dos1 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ditching Chrome is something we need to teach everyone. The DOJ is totally spineless and refuses to squash Google's absurd monopoly on the internet. We are literally the last line of defense, even though we really don't amount to much. Perhaps we could start a grassroots movement.

You don’t need a grassroots movement when other movements doing this exact thing already exist. In fact it is likely counterproductive. Mozilla Foundation is the organization you want to support, or EFF.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#387

Post by tzury »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #365
tzury wrote: post #348

The OP argues that fingerprinting is a "privacy nightmare," but we need to look at why it exists. From a pragmatic perspective, we are forcing two very different networks to run on the same protocols: The Business Internet: Banking, SaaS, and VC-funded content (Meta/Google). The Fun Internet: Hobby blogs, Lego fan sites, and the "GeoCities" spirit. You cannot have a functioning "Business Internet" without identity ve…

No. Fingerprinting is a function of the ad network to identify ad-worth aspects of me. That some aspects may be used to push bots away is a minor effect.

I am assuming you are not in the bot mitigation business.

An encrypted cookie from a company such as cloudflare encapsulates a multi dimensional datum such that, generating one in a legitimate browser, and letting a botnet using it will get detected and blocked.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#389

Post by IshKebab »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #230
IshKebab wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok so his issue is even more obtuse - he doesn't care about fingerprinting; he cares that not all JS code is GPL.

Did you actually read the article? It doesn't mention GPL even once. And neither does the page on LibreJS, which is the tool he created to attempt to address the problem[1] [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/

Did you? The whole thing is about how JavaScript allows running nonfree (that means not GPL to him) software on your computer without realising it.

Re: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

#390

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

IshKebab wrote: post #389
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually read the article? It doesn't mention GPL even once. And neither does the page on LibreJS, which is the tool he created to attempt to address the problem[1] [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/

Did you? The whole thing is about how JavaScript allows running nonfree (that means not GPL to him) software on your computer without realising it.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=IshKebab

> Did you? The whole thing is about how JavaScript allows running nonfree (that means not GPL to him) software on your computer without realising it.

No, Free is not the same as GPL you ignoramus.

Post reply on HN