A web page that tells you what your browser gave away the moment you arrived. No login, no form, no permission. Most pages do this. None of them tell you.
Interesting, I wonder how unique the fingerprinting is though, they don’t give you any specific stats.
Is it really possible to identify me with like 1/100 precision for example, if you don’t have my real IP, real country, no trackers, and all you have is a list of fonts, my graphics card, and the browser info?
Yeah, I kinda wish the site generated a hash or something because I’ve got an extension that fakes the canvas results, but the site says those identifiers are unique for me… But are they the same unique (which indicates the extension isn’t doing anything) or different each time (which might even make the others less useful if it aggregates everything?
I did notice earlier today that the YouTube recommendations were all actually related to the video I was currently watching instead of it trying to get me to go down a rabbit hole I’ve already been down even logged out, like it does on my desktop where I haven’t installed that extension.
That’s the magic of fingerprinting. They don’t need what we would consider are the “real” signals like IP address anymore.
They can create a composite value based on boring stuff like the things you mentioned, plus a few others. They can pull fun stuff like the details of your TLS handshake OS, browser, versions of various plugins/addons, etc. Given 20+ signals they can fingerprint you pretty well. They store it and just profile you, follow you around.
VPNs, privacy addons are just more signals to use to fingerprint you. You stand out even more when you try to hide. It’s been this way for a while now.
I don’t understand why this should be inherently impossible. If you buy a separate device, and use that exclusively for one thing and do not cross-contaminate, that should work to avoid fingerprinting right? And this is all information that your computer is voluntarily providing, and is I assume possible to change independently from the hardware. So why not?
Interesting, I wonder how unique the fingerprinting is though, they don’t give you any specific stats.
Is it really possible to identify me with like 1/100 precision for example, if you don’t have my real IP, real country, no trackers, and all you have is a list of fonts, my graphics card, and the browser info?
Yeah, I kinda wish the site generated a hash or something because I’ve got an extension that fakes the canvas results, but the site says those identifiers are unique for me… But are they the same unique (which indicates the extension isn’t doing anything) or different each time (which might even make the others less useful if it aggregates everything?
I did notice earlier today that the YouTube recommendations were all actually related to the video I was currently watching instead of it trying to get me to go down a rabbit hole I’ve already been down even logged out, like it does on my desktop where I haven’t installed that extension.
That’s the magic of fingerprinting. They don’t need what we would consider are the “real” signals like IP address anymore.
They can create a composite value based on boring stuff like the things you mentioned, plus a few others. They can pull fun stuff like the details of your TLS handshake OS, browser, versions of various plugins/addons, etc. Given 20+ signals they can fingerprint you pretty well. They store it and just profile you, follow you around.
VPNs, privacy addons are just more signals to use to fingerprint you. You stand out even more when you try to hide. It’s been this way for a while now.
Is there any way to browse the web without being fingerprinted, short of literally using a separate computer
Really?
No.
It’s been this way for a while. At best, you can use some techniques to provide plausible deniability from a legal perspective.
Not that laws matter anymore.
The best you can do is try to blend in.
I don’t understand why this should be inherently impossible. If you buy a separate device, and use that exclusively for one thing and do not cross-contaminate, that should work to avoid fingerprinting right? And this is all information that your computer is voluntarily providing, and is I assume possible to change independently from the hardware. So why not?