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...

all 8 comments

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[–] [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.

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

This is why I use multiple web browsers for different sites and workflow :)

[–] [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.