I loaded the site and went through the stuff and it worked fine. Then I turned on my VPN, and it gave me a new ID.
Changing my VPN endpoint and refreshing the page didn’t work, it still knew who I was, but closing the window and quitting the browser before changing the VPN again gave me a third ID.
They seem to know quite a bit about my phone, but it doesn’t seem like there is much that it could differentiate it from another person with the same model of phone.
It’s interesting to me because while it’s mostly correct in each instance I tried it (phone, desktop) it actually gets some pertinent information incorrect.
For one, it only recognized the one monitor I had the browser open on, I have four monitors, so it got the resolution correct for a single monitor, but fails to capture the others, and so technically if I opened it on a different monitor with a different resolution (I had two that have different resolutions), that aspect of the fingerprint should change.
Secondly, when I went to this link from my cell phone it registered it as me typing the link in by hand while on PC it correctly registered where the link originated from (here on lemmy). Although I was using Jerboa on Android so perhaps it can’t read link origin from Jerboa (which is good).
Finally, it registers my Wayland session as X11, although I’m not sure if that’s a current limitation of browsers since Wayland isn’t the dominant compositor yet and perhaps hasn’t been added to browser user-agent info yet.
I loaded the site and went through the stuff and it worked fine. Then I turned on my VPN, and it gave me a new ID.
Changing my VPN endpoint and refreshing the page didn’t work, it still knew who I was, but closing the window and quitting the browser before changing the VPN again gave me a third ID.
They seem to know quite a bit about my phone, but it doesn’t seem like there is much that it could differentiate it from another person with the same model of phone.
This was a fun exercise.
It’s interesting to me because while it’s mostly correct in each instance I tried it (phone, desktop) it actually gets some pertinent information incorrect.
For one, it only recognized the one monitor I had the browser open on, I have four monitors, so it got the resolution correct for a single monitor, but fails to capture the others, and so technically if I opened it on a different monitor with a different resolution (I had two that have different resolutions), that aspect of the fingerprint should change.
Secondly, when I went to this link from my cell phone it registered it as me typing the link in by hand while on PC it correctly registered where the link originated from (here on lemmy). Although I was using Jerboa on Android so perhaps it can’t read link origin from Jerboa (which is good).
Finally, it registers my Wayland session as X11, although I’m not sure if that’s a current limitation of browsers since Wayland isn’t the dominant compositor yet and perhaps hasn’t been added to browser user-agent info yet.