Having a unique fingerprint I swear is just a way to scare people into compliance. Unique doesn’t always mean known. Sure, it’s unique that they can’t track you so well. Oh no…
I feel if 1 out of 200 people had this unique fingerprint, it’d be hard to distinguish who’s actually who. No distinct way to really differentiate with such little data being allowed to be gathered.
The paradox is that your traffic is so unique that it can be compared to traffic captured from other websites you’ve visited and be used to build a profile around your commonly visited websites and current interests.
That fingerprint is then sold to brokers that forward to websites that will serve targeted content to your fingerprint when you do happen to show up. It doesn’t necessarily care what your identity is just that you have an identity.
But if you’re not running multiple tabs, or in private tab view, and you’re not allowing most or any cookies, then they’re going to have a harder time following what you do and where you go.
Use a solid VPN
Use Firefox derivative (Waterfox and Libre Wolf, feel free to use multiple to separate tracking)
Use pivate tab mode
Use Privacy Badger (EFF)
Use Port Authority (highly rated port scan blocker to block network port scanning from LexisNexis)
Close unused tabs
Clear cache and cookies on exit
Disable unused network stuff (WiFi and/or data, GPS, BT, NFC, anything that’s not required that could be used for location scanning)
On Android 15+ iirc, disabled mic and/or camera permissions until necessary. Most people don’t talk on the phone anymore so it’s rare you need the mic (unblock for camera)
Imagine enough data was random that it was always unique. Never duplicate.
Or if that’s some kind of issue, then instead allowing the user to randomize their fingerprints by click of button. Surely there’s some kind of spoofing, virtualization, something that browsers can do to effectively “randomize” the measured fingerprint by third parties.
I use Fake Traveler to spoof location sometimes. I sometimes do this while shopping for various travel things that are affected by region… If you catch my drift.
For me my fingerprint is unique, but the advertisers list was empty so yeah, it’s pretty pointless when you have Adblock at a dns level. You can be identified by first party sites, but that requires visiting every advertisers site to actually get them to fingerprint you. Otherwise your data won’t and can’t be sold realistically.
Edit: but yes, I am satisfied. I just need to know how to do settings so .js IS enabled but also not so evil (and I doubt it’s possible), as well as just general functionality with privacy, if that’s even possible.
Having a unique fingerprint I swear is just a way to scare people into compliance. Unique doesn’t always mean known. Sure, it’s unique that they can’t track you so well. Oh no…
I feel if 1 out of 200 people had this unique fingerprint, it’d be hard to distinguish who’s actually who. No distinct way to really differentiate with such little data being allowed to be gathered.
The paradox is that your traffic is so unique that it can be compared to traffic captured from other websites you’ve visited and be used to build a profile around your commonly visited websites and current interests.
That fingerprint is then sold to brokers that forward to websites that will serve targeted content to your fingerprint when you do happen to show up. It doesn’t necessarily care what your identity is just that you have an identity.
But if you’re not running multiple tabs, or in private tab view, and you’re not allowing most or any cookies, then they’re going to have a harder time following what you do and where you go.
I shouldn’t need a 9 point checklist to browse the internet. I’d rather there be proper user protections in place.
Oh for sure! I agree! But I do the following, mostly automated through settings, to either poison the data or avoid them from getting it at all.
Imagine enough data was random that it was always unique. Never duplicate.
Or if that’s some kind of issue, then instead allowing the user to randomize their fingerprints by click of button. Surely there’s some kind of spoofing, virtualization, something that browsers can do to effectively “randomize” the measured fingerprint by third parties.
I use Fake Traveler to spoof location sometimes. I sometimes do this while shopping for various travel things that are affected by region… If you catch my drift.
https://f-droid.org/packages/cl.coders.faketraveler
For me my fingerprint is unique, but the advertisers list was empty so yeah, it’s pretty pointless when you have Adblock at a dns level. You can be identified by first party sites, but that requires visiting every advertisers site to actually get them to fingerprint you. Otherwise your data won’t and can’t be sold realistically.
I’m 1 in 166 million lol, I think I’m easy to track, however a lot of the data is wrong so not sure how to feel
One out of 119k.
Edit: but yes, I am satisfied. I just need to know how to do settings so .js IS enabled but also not so evil (and I doubt it’s possible), as well as just general functionality with privacy, if that’s even possible.