The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

Based on your comment it sounds like you rarely travel (booking hotel / flights online), don’t have mobility issues (ordering groceries / household essentials online), don’t participate in online banking (do you write checks? carry cash with you all the time? go to an ATM weekly?), you don’t stream movies or tv shows, and you enjoy looking for apartments to rent in your local newspaper listing, and you enjoy using paper maps when traveling around the city and world. I could go on…

literally everything useful works on the business internet. Also how do you think local businesses near you operate? They don’t call each like the 1900s lol. They order stock from distributors, some local and some overseas. Often they are doing this on the business internet. Today’s global supply chain makes this a non-starter.

It’s OK if YOU personally prefer doing everything slowly and in person and don’t value the convenience of the business internet. No judgment. But don’t pretend this would be an easy transition at all. Or that most people would prefer to live that way.

IMO it would make _way_ more sense to introduce reasonable privacy regulations that are better thought out than GDPR and have proper enforcement.

Maybe a formal “community” version of the internet would be appropriate as well.

You mean tree fiddy per month, right?

I think you misread. They said the opposite: that he was taking drugs and his takes were good, then he stopped taking drugs and now they’re bad.

I’m not saying I agree or that I even think his takes have gotten worse, just clarifying what the other poster said.

I've had good success with tracking tool tests and resistFingerprinting. Granted, I usually use it with uMatrix/NoScript most of the time which cuts down on the available data a lot and maybe makes it an unfair test. One issue, I expect, is simply not enough people using resist fingerprinting to add variation to the mix. Since it's off by default, and only a small % of users use Firefox and an even tinier percentage use resistFingerprinting, unlike your example of Tor where probably most people on the tor network use the tor browser, it's likely that simply blocking things is a fingerprint all on its own. The solution there would be to get more people using it :)

I will say one downside to using it is far more bot detection websites freaking out over generic information being returned to them, causing some sites to break (some of their settings breaking webgl games too due to low values). Using a different profile avoids this, or explicitly whitelisting certain sites in privacy.resistFingerprinting.exemptedDomains - obviously if a site is using a generic tracking service for bot detection, that kills a fair amount of the benefit of the flag, so a separate profile might be best. I wish firefox had a container option for this.

... and. not too sure what you mean by changing window size on a non-standardised device. They do try to ensure the window sizes are at standard intervals, as if they were fullscreened at typical widths to reduce fingerprinting, but surely that applies to using Tor too? I mean, people don't use Tor on dedicated monitors at standard sizes.

>you rarely travel (booking hotel / flights online)

Yes, and I really dislike traveling when I have to. I personally wish that air travel would become unaffordable for most people, including myself.

>don’t have mobility issues (ordering groceries / household essentials online)

No, but mobility issues existed before the modern internet.

>don’t participate in online banking (do you write checks? carry cash with you all the time? go to an ATM weekly?)

I do online banking, but I also write checks and use cash. I don't use Venmo or similar services. Once I can get ahead of my chores & projects I'm thinking about getting a local branch at a credit union and totally avoiding a banking app on my smart phone.

>you don’t stream movies or tv shows

Sometimes, but I'm getting away from it. Interestingly I'm getting a blank screen (but there's still audio) when attempting to stream on Linux. I haven't fully researched it, but some preliminary research suggests that it's anti-Linux blocking. (at least one user reported the problem went away -- in a repeatable fashion -- when switching their use agent to Windows) So although this is not confirmed, I'm preparing for a time when this is unavoidable and I won't stream movies or TV whatsoever at that point.

> and you enjoy looking for apartments to rent in your local newspaper listing

Don't see anything wrong with this. I would actually argue that you don't need authentication in the way discussed in this conversation for this, though -- all you need is the listing, which can be totally anonymous. The actual application for the apartment can happen in person, and that's when verification needs to occur.

>you enjoy using paper maps when traveling around the city and world.

I use an old-fashioned GPS in my car that I paid well over $100 for a number of years ago. There's no tracking whatsoever, unlike the GPS used in a smart phone.

>literally everything useful works on the business internet. >Also how do you think local businesses near you operate? They don’t call each like the 1900s lol. They order stock from distributors, some local and some overseas

Except we did fine for most of human history before all this. And I'm sure there were no such think as stock orders or warehouses or supply chains before the modern internet. They cropped up over night the moment the first tracking cookie existed. /s