Privacy

33192 readers

317 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How anti-fingerprinting extensions tend to make fingerprinting easier (palant.info)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

An interesting take on browser extensions which hope to prevent fingerprinting

With respect to native browser functionality:

Browser vendors have already invested a considerable amount of work into anti-fingerprinting. However, they usually limited themselves to measures which wouldn’t break existing websites...

And extensions:

Privacy protection extensions on the other hand aren’t showing as much concern. So they will typically do something like:

screen.width = 1280;
screen.height = 1024;

There you go, the website will now see the same display resolution for everybody, right? Well, that’s unless the website does this:

delete screen.width; delete screen.height;

And suddenly screen.width and screen.height are restored to their original values...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Disabling Javascript shoud decrease the fingerprinting for the most part right?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 children)

That probably goes a long way, but there are several ways of fingerprinting without javascript (Firefox appears to be working on beating many of them) including:

tracking favicons: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7v5y7/browser-favicons-can-be-used-as-undeletable-supercookies-to-track-you-online, https://lemmy.ml/post/53874
tracking https session handshake tokens: https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/19/tls_handshake_privacy/
css: New Browser Attack Allows Tracking Users Online With JavaScript Disabled: https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/new-browser-attack-allows-tracking.html

and just the general header information the browser sends by default can put users in a bucket by geolocation, platform, browser etc.

But Firefox seems to be getting many of the most egregrious problems under control.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago

I suppose in that case we should choose the sites we browse carefully.