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Do you really need the Tor browser to do this? I just sign into Facebook, Google, &c services using one browser, and do everything else in another — all of whi

• noncoml 8y ago
  Do they not try to match you based on your IP? After all if they know it is a residential IP, they probably know that no matter the user-agent, traffic belongs to the family. And I assume they know who all your family members are.
  • rosser 8y ago
    That's also a good reason, thanks! If I'm blocking trackers from those sites in all of my browsers, though, are they ever even seeing my IP outside the traffic I deliberately send them?
    • errantmind 8y ago
      Not all trackers are client-side
      • rosser 8y ago
        And people wonder why some of us talk about the unclean hands of the online ad/tracking/modeling/&c industry...
  • notjtrig 8y ago
    When you use tor it says not to maximize the window because sites can use your screen resolution to track you. More realisticly they could match operating system from the user agent with other data. I remember chrome being acused of putting serial number like strings in the user agent. Why would they not?
    • noncoml 8y ago
      Completely agree. And moreover they don’t need to match you with 100% level of confidence. Even something as low as 10% is probably enough.
    • codingowl 8y ago
      These are the basic basics for tweaking FF's about:config. There are many more. Try these and see how you fare... layout.css.visited_links_enabled set to false; geo.enabled set to false; media.navigator.enabled set to false; media.peerconnection.enabled (WebRTC) set to false; network.http.sendRefererHeader set to 0; privacy.resistFingerprinting set to true; privacy.firstparty.isolate set to true; network.dns.disablePrefetch set to true; network.prefetch-next set to false; webgl.disabled set to true Don't forget to also use something like uBlock Origin, Token Tracker Stipper, and Decentraleyes. Pass is all through a Pi-hole and VPN and you're pretty safe. Make sure your VPN does not expose your NAT'd IP with WebRTC. Both uBlock Origina and ScriptSafe can help with this, as FF will sometimes crap all over its about:config settings with updates.
      • jerheinze 8y ago
        A VPN does not offer privacy-by-design, it's at best a privacy-by-policy product.
      • TheRealPomax 8y ago
        Note that this also has some insane side effects, eg setting resist fingerprint also breaks anything that assumed JavaScript date objects actually reflect local time. Like Gmail. Surprise!
      • anticodon 8y ago
        FF also has an extension for always opening Facebook in an isolated container: https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook
    • Double_a_92 8y ago
      Wouldn't a randomly sized window be more unique than a fullscreen resolution (of which there are probably only a handfull of common ones)?
• jerheinze 8y ago
  In that setup your browser fingerprint alone is enough to uniquely identify you, and it doesn't protect you from tracking by the first-party domains themselves. See as well: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/ https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/ > Site-specific or filter-based addons such as AdBlock Plus, Request Policy, Ghostery, Priv3, and Sharemenot are to be avoided. We believe that these addons do not add any real privacy to a proper implementation of the above privacy requirements, and that development efforts should be focused on general solutions that prevent tracking by all third parties, rather than a list of specific URLs or hosts. > Implementing filter-based blocking directly into the browser, such as done with Firefox' Tracking Protection, does not alleviate the concerns mentioned in the previous paragraph. There is still just a list containing specific URLs and hosts which, in this case, are assembled by Disconnect and adapted by Mozilla. > Trying to resort to filter methods based on machine learning does not solve the problem either: they don't provide a general solution to the tracking problem as they are working probabilistically. Even with a precision rate at 99% and a false positive rate at 0.1% trackers would be missed and sites would be wrongly blocked. > Filter-based solutions in general can also introduce strange breakage and cause usability nightmares. For instance, there is a trend to observe that websites start detecting filer extensions and block access to content on them. Coping with this fallout easily leads to just whitelisting the affected domains, hoping that this helps, defeating the purpose of the filter in the first place. Filters will also fail to do their job if an adversary simply registers a new domain or creates a new URL path. Worse still, the unique filter sets that each user creates or installs will provide a wealth of fingerprinting targets.
  • gregw134 8y ago
    In practice IP address is the most important component of browser fingerprinting. Browser fingerprinting can tell advertisers things like: person x has a 2011 MacBook Pro, is running Firefox, and has installed these 3 plugins. If that person visits a coffeeshop, clears their cookies, then revisits the same coffeeshop they will be easy to identify because they're linked by an IP address and a fairly unique configuration. Once you take IP address and city out of the equation browser fingerprinting becomes much harder, because the chances that someone else in the world has the same configuration becomes much higher.
• mark_l_watson 8y ago
  I also use the two browser approach, plus a vpn, to get some tracking protection.