4 ms·

If I understand it correctly, the way this fingerprinting works is just by using questions you need to show the website properly. 'What is your screen resoluti

If I understand it correctly, the way this fingerprinting works is just by using questions you need to show the website properly. 'What is your screen resolution? What HTML5 features do you support? Do you have this font/plugin?' Bar giving up all those facilities, the best you can do is ask and hope they comply....

mpeg 10y ago
There's browser extensions that will fake all of those to a standard value. The tricky part is that with fingerprinting, depending on your chosen faked value you could end up being more identifiable, if not enough people use it. For instance, you can change your user agent and headers to some generic Windows Chrome one but a savvy tracker will fingerprint your TCP connection and realise you are actually on a Mac, and that can be used as a further source of entropy to better identify you. I've spent more time than is healthy looking into ways to uniquely identify devices on the internet. While the company I was working for was always on the safe side in terms of privacy, the more blackhat methods can be useful in collaborating with law enforcement to deanonimise Tor users (think pedophiles, not drugs) Tor Browser devs have in turn been really good at hardening fingerprinting attack vectors related to it (and rightly so, browsers don't rape people — people rape people) but unless you're super paranoid it's not a great experience for the average user. I think a better solution will come (at least in the EU) from the proposal to extend cookie law to any kind of fingerprinting (regardless of storage), which takes use case in account and can be enforced through big fines.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > There's browser extensions that will fake all of those to a standard value. The tricky part is that with fingerprinting, depending on your chosen faked value you could end up being more identifiable, if not enough people use it. Couldn't this be worked around by reporting random values every time?
  - mpeg 10y ago
    Kinda, but then the random values just become a flag for "has x browser extension installed" and the trackers will still use the things you can't change, like the OS networking stack, GPU, audio, etc. to track you. It's very hard to get away completely... even with Tor, if you are the only person who uses Tor to visit a certain site you are as trackable as anyone else for that site.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  ...collaborating with law enforcement to deanonimise Tor users (think pedophiles, not drugs) It would be interesting to see some reports on that question. Of course, the Law would never abide such accountability, but one can dream...
  - mpeg 10y ago
    Well, in my experience it was done in a case-by-case basis and led through the great work of NGO "Thorn" (the one founded by Ashton Kutchen & Demi Moore) I don't know about accountability, but we provided support in a proactive way and never more than we were comfortable with (no carte blanche access to data for LEOs, etc.)
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      My mistake; that certainly seems legitimate.

mpeg 10y ago

There's browser extensions that will fake all of those to a standard value. The tricky part is that with fingerprinting, depending on your chosen faked value you could end up being more identifiable, if not enough people use it. For instance, you can change your user agent and headers to some generic Windows Chrome one but a savvy tracker will fingerprint your TCP connection and realise you are actually on a Mac, and that can be used as a further source of entropy to better identify you. I've spent more time than is healthy looking into ways to uniquely identify devices on the internet. While the company I was working for was always on the safe side in terms of privacy, the more blackhat methods can be useful in collaborating with law enforcement to deanonimise Tor users (think pedophiles, not drugs) Tor Browser devs have in turn been really good at hardening fingerprinting attack vectors related to it (and rightly so, browsers don't rape people — people rape people) but unless you're super paranoid it's not a great experience for the average user. I think a better solution will come (at least in the EU) from the proposal to extend cookie law to any kind of fingerprinting (regardless of storage), which takes use case in account and can be enforced through big fines.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> There's browser extensions that will fake all of those to a standard value. The tricky part is that with fingerprinting, depending on your chosen faked value you could end up being more identifiable, if not enough people use it. Couldn't this be worked around by reporting random values every time?
- mpeg 10y ago
  Kinda, but then the random values just become a flag for "has x browser extension installed" and the trackers will still use the things you can't change, like the OS networking stack, GPU, audio, etc. to track you. It's very hard to get away completely... even with Tor, if you are the only person who uses Tor to visit a certain site you are as trackable as anyone else for that site.
jessaustin 10y ago
...collaborating with law enforcement to deanonimise Tor users (think pedophiles, not drugs) It would be interesting to see some reports on that question. Of course, the Law would never abide such accountability, but one can dream...
- mpeg 10y ago
  Well, in my experience it was done in a case-by-case basis and led through the great work of NGO "Thorn" (the one founded by Ashton Kutchen & Demi Moore) I don't know about accountability, but we provided support in a proactive way and never more than we were comfortable with (no carte blanche access to data for LEOs, etc.)
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    My mistake; that certainly seems legitimate.