Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On Google’s Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting

blog.lukaszolejnik.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 64 posts

Re: On Google’s Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting

#51

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #4
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

The simplest, readily available solution ---use Brave or LibreWolf. These can't prevent all fingerprinting but they can make it less reliable and more difficult and costly for a fingerprint to be relayed back to the mother ship. Personalized advertising is one of the dumbest ideas of the 21st century. Studies show it is less effective than context sensitive ads and it costs more. Participants in ad auctions are essen…

Ah yes, Brave, the browser that highjacks websites to inject their own referral code, that's the right browser to use for privacy conscious people.

So... humor me... let's say that this is exactly true, and Brave adds or replaces referral codes. Is that a privacy problem? The only information that the website gets is that you're using Brave, but not where you got the link. We can absolutely talk about the ethics of the thing or such, but I can't see why privacy conscious people would care.

Re: On Google’s Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting

#52

Post by [deleted] »

Hizonner wrote: post #42
fsflover wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the Tor Browser?

Very hard to link with your name or other elements of your "real identity" (unless you ever give them out over Tor). Probably only slightly hard to link all the things you do using a given installation of the browser to each other . They do at least try, but it's still basically Firefox, and it's not clear that it's even possible to make an unfingerprintable browser.

[deleted]

Re: On Google’s Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting

#53

Post by jqpabc123 »

i_love_retros wrote: post #48
jqpabc123 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, yes. The browser that tags every install with a unique identifier.

Got any more info on this?

https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-...

This data will allow us to correlate telemetry IDs with download tokens and Google Analytics IDs.

Re: On Google’s Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting

#54

Post by iLoveOncall »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #51
iLoveOncall wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, Brave, the browser that highjacks websites to inject their own referral code, that's the right browser to use for privacy conscious people.

So... humor me... let's say that this is exactly true, and Brave adds or replaces referral codes. Is that a privacy problem? The only information that the website gets is that you're using Brave, but not where you got the link. We can absolutely talk about the ethics of the thing or such, but I can't see why privacy conscious people would care.

No, it's a security problem, which is much worse.

Re: On Google’s Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting

#55

Post by fsflover »

bobajeff wrote: post #14
dewey wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplest solution is Firefox or Safari, not another Chromium browser or niche Firefox Fork.

Simplest solution is to not use computers anymore. Move to a cabin in the woods, away from civilization, and live off the fat of the land.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975

Re: On Google’s Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting

#56

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #54
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... humor me... let's say that this is exactly true, and Brave adds or replaces referral codes. Is that a privacy problem? The only information that the website gets is that you're using Brave, but not where you got the link. We can absolutely talk about the ethics of the thing or such, but I can't see why privacy conscious people would care.

No, it's a security problem, which is much worse.

Okay, then what's the security problem? What attacker does it enable, and what does it let them do?

Re: On Google’s Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting

#58

Post by NemoNobody »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #38
NemoNobody wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fr, ignore these people and try Brave Browser. I care less about privacy than I do an annoying Internet. There NO ADS with Brave Browser - like I just DO NOT SEE ADS anywhere on the Internet. Anyone that has been using Chrome can't possibly care about privacy anyways and they can't know what I mean about ads online.

> There NO ADS with Brave Browser - like I just DO NOT SEE ADS anywhere on the Internet. There are no ads with any browser provided that you press one button and install a browser extension that blocks them. Brave isn't an issue regarding privacy, it's a security issue, see what I said on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42656123 .

I don't think you know what I mean about ads. The pages are setup different on Chrome and Google inserts ads into everything, over the website itself, it doesn't matter what content you are viewing, you just need to be viewing anything.

There are no ads on Brave. Not on the side of the pages, not in the middle the content scroll, not behind the content scroll, not before or after - no ads.

If you use pirate streaming sites - I rarely, rarely have a popup ad on those when I do use them.

It's not just ads, it's all about the user with Brave - most sites open in reader mode, I have to actually select to see the website itself, otherwise I just get all the content I want by default and only that content.

I have 2 different compromised gmails - both of which happened during my years using Chrome, tho one was the Experian hack I'm pretty sure, Google is not secure, I don't know why anyone would ever think that.

Re: On Google’s Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting

#59

Post by tholdem »

fsflover wrote: post #50
tholdem wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QubesOS is great if you need to do work and personal stuff on the same computer. I do most of my stuff in the browser and have a separate computer for work. I am mostly interested in making initial access as expensive and difficult as possible. You are still just as vulnerable or more vulnerable to malware stealing browser sessions, passwords, and everything you have on the AppVM the browser is running on than you ar…

> QubesOS is great if you need to do work and personal stuff on the same computer This is significantly underestimating the benefits of Qubes. Are you using your online banking in the same browser that you use for random web surfing? I do it in separate VMs with hardware isolation. Same compartmentalization with all other things. > You are still just as vulnerable or more vulnerable to malware stealing browser sessio…

> This is significantly underestimating the benefits of Qubes. Are you using your online banking in the same browser that you use for random web surfing? I do it in separate VMs with hardware isolation. Same compartmentalization with all other things.

What about NetVM? All AppVMs us that so what if that get's compromised? Since the templates are not hardened at all, could the attacker jump from NetVM to AppVM?

> I'm not using the same VM for everything but dedicated VMs for bank, email, HN, instant messaging and so on. A malware on a random website would only get the access to an empty VM, nothing more.

So how many Templates and AppVMs do you have? Each of those dedicated VMs would need their own AppVMs at least. You have Domain: Bank, Domain: Email (do all email accounts get their own domain?), Domain: HN, Domain: Github, Domain: Stackoverflow, Domain: Signal and so on.

> If your VM is compromised, no hardening will save your data

So that means layered security is totally meaningless and instead of keeping it default, let's remove mitigations?

> you never run anything untrusted in trusted ones and never have anything valuable in untrusted ones.

In practice, this is close to impossible.

> I don't understand why one wouldn't use them for everything not requiring saving the data

Disposable VMs were the best part of QubesOS, but unfortunately, it's is pretty common that you need to login to something or save something, which means you can't use DisposableVMs for everything.

Re: On Google’s Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting

#60

Post by iLoveOncall »

NemoNobody wrote: post #58
iLoveOncall wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There NO ADS with Brave Browser - like I just DO NOT SEE ADS anywhere on the Internet. There are no ads with any browser provided that you press one button and install a browser extension that blocks them. Brave isn't an issue regarding privacy, it's a security issue, see what I said on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42656123 .

I don't think you know what I mean about ads. The pages are setup different on Chrome and Google inserts ads into everything, over the website itself, it doesn't matter what content you are viewing, you just need to be viewing anything. There are no ads on Brave. Not on the side of the pages, not in the middle the content scroll, not behind the content scroll, not before or after - no ads. If you use pirate streaming…

I never have any ads whatsoever on any website that I visit. I legitimately cannot understand what you're talking about. Pages on Chrome and Brave look exactly the same.

Seems like a user issue.

Post reply on HN