Bit of an uphill fight with captchas everywhere. Do people here conduct all online activity over VPN whenever possible? Only for the sensitive stuff? Or perhaps the inverse because the bank already knows you? Maybe when travelling or getting around region blocking? Something else?
The one provided by my work aside, I realized that I don’t have any consistent rules around using VPN. Except sometimes, you know, when downloading ISO’s for my favorite distos.
Mostly just for torrents, one machine on my local network is always using a VPN to connect to the external internet. I would use it for more things like private web browsing, but without substantial additional setup I think my web browsing is guaranteed to be fingerprinted regardless of whether I conceal my IP so until I bother to set that up it doesn’t seem like there is much point.
Do not try to do anti-fingerprinting yourself. Cobbling together your own configuration will only make you stand out more. Use a pre-configured browser from a reputable company. This way you blend in with everybody else using the same browser. And don’t install extensions either unless you really know what you’re doing. Extensions usually change your fingerprint.
Use Tor Browser for browsing over Tor, Mullvad Browser for everything else. Librewolf is fine for when you don’t care about hiding your fingerprint, like when you are logging into email and bank accounts.
fonts, screen resolution, many things can affect fingerprint.
The solution is not “a browser from a reputable company.”
It will be a browser designed by security professionals to spoof fingerprints, along with a “crawler” that analyzes the current blend of fingerprints already out there, crawling not web pages but the request headers instead, and canvas outputs, etc.
I don’t think such a browser plus infrastructure exist yet, but they will. It is inevitable.
Such a browser will output garbage yet plausible and believable fingerprints that maximize ambiguity.
What makes you think the Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser are not made by “security professionals”? Have you used either of them? They already have defenses against font, screen resolution, and many other fingerprinting vectors.
Also, “plausible and believable” fingerprints were already considered by Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser, and I believe are actively in use by Brave Browser. I forget why Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser opted to instead give everybody the same fingerprint, but there was a reason for it.
tried tor on tails and on whonix in a qubes vm. still being tracked by google. it might work for you though.
If you enable Javascript there’s still some crazy ways you can be tracked beyond the normal fingerprinting techniques. Stuff like mouse and keyboard tracking. Or looking at your behavior (what posts you view the longest, which photos you zoom into).
Disabling Javascript (using Tor Browser in the Safest setting) is the safest. Second to that, is enabling Javascript for websites you trust. You can use the NoScript extension to allow some scripts while blocking others. Usually you only need to allow scripts from the website itself, and block ones from third-parties like Google.
What were the issues you ran into?
i disable javascirpt and use safest setting
I use invidious to check if google is tracking me (i get recommended videos i like on the first page so i know its not behavoir fingerprint)