Privacy

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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.

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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...

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Actually. Everybody tries to get rid of tracking by making everyone look the same. Wouldn't it be easier to just randomize a person to every site/session instead?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

What do you mean in practice ?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

All the properties that are fingerprinted (resolution, canvas output, etc) should be made as unique as possible, but different for every site a user visits. So instead of trying to make everyone have the same face, make everyone's face change every minute.