8 ms·

Protip #2, for what cant be traced using conventional methods, they will use fingerprinting and those add-ons take care about most common methods of fingerprint

• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• xvector 6y ago
  Firefox already includes many of these, some of those plugins are redundant or unnecessary.
  • danShumway 6y ago
    > already includes many of these Make sure you turn them on though! Firefox by default doesn't block canvas fingerprinting, that's a setting you need to enable in `about:config` under the `privacy.resistFingerprinting` section.
    • maltalex 6y ago
      Why aren't they on by default? What's the downside?
      • pietroglyph 6y ago
        Google bullies you with Captchas if you have `privacy.resistFingerprinting` on.
        • AsyncAwait 6y ago
          One solution for this, at least for search, would be to use something like https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
          • Shared404 6y ago
            I've also found DDG to be more then adequate for search. The issue I had more often is random captcha's for sites I actually need to use not letting me through. (Thanks school). My solution for this is to keep de-googled Chromium installed, and just use it when I run across these sites.
            • Zenbit_UX 6y ago
              I've used DDG for about a year straight now, it's adequate but I find myself needing a !g at least once a day. Searching DDG for error messages & recent events from the news tab are really lagging behind what Google provides unfortunately.
              • BuckRogers 6y ago
                I use !sp if I want to see Google results. I only use it two or three times a year for critical searches that I want more than one result set for but it may suit your needs. Google News is pretty good but I prefer Inoreader anyway, !ddgn is usually good enough for me, for specific news searches.
      • danShumway 6y ago
        Increased captchas, sometimes sites will also break for non-obvious reasons (usually because you need to flip the setting that enables canvas data reading to the left of the URL bar), your time zone will be set to UTC on every website that you visit. There are a few ways of looking at the captchas; the optimistic lens is to look at it as a response to people who say that it's impossible to meaningfully reduce fingerprinting. If that was true, Google wouldn't be so mad at me for flipping this setting on. But it does make some browsing more annoying, especially if you're not technically savy enough to realize what's going on when something unexpected happens. I think it's the right decision for them to have it off by default (at least for right now).
    • ignoramous 6y ago
      I've been treated with endless Google Captchas with that setting, and they get very difficult with each passing day, never mind the time-sink.
      • Angeo34 6y ago
        Google captcha works by uniquely identifying you. The easier Google can track you the easier your captcha. That's why it's nearly impossible to solve captcha with resistfingerprint on (ie tor mode)
        • mderazon 6y ago
          Wow didn't know that. Do you have a source? How do they decide which captcha is harder ?
          • squarefoot 6y ago
            The parent used wrong phrasing but it's real. The captchas don't become harder to solve but longer. If Google detects you're blocking trackers (or possibly cookies) it will throw at you an huge number of captchas until you give up. Imagine having to click like 12 panels of street lights, cars, bicycles, trucks, buses, etc. sometimes multiple times. This is getting out of control, really. I miss so much the Web 1.0 from 1999.
            • alskdj21 6y ago
              What I do on captchas is to hit the skip button until it would prompt you to verify. You can try if this could help. Captchas should be tone down to something bareable. I even got to a point that I'll drop the site because of this.
            • asddubs 6y ago
              the worst part is when cloudflare puts you on their shitlist and you have to fill out these dumb captchas for 6 minutes before you can even access just about half of the sites on the internet
    • mderazon 6y ago
      Instead of resisting fingerprinting and suffering captcha everywhere, can't FF feed false data into the fingerprinting "sensors" so that it will change every time ?
      • Zenbit_UX 6y ago
        I've wondered the same, the answer seems to be maybe, but the challenge is doing so in a way that doesn't blow up normal webpage functionality. For example, a fingerprinting script might try to measure the viewport height and width, calling on window.height can give it that info, but if Firefox were to fake that info when a friendly script calls for it, the page might try to reflow to the new size, etc. All kinds of desired behavior can use these same values, the challenge is determining whose a bad actor.
    • stuartd 6y ago
      I used privacy.resistFingerprinting until I realized that was the reason websites were displaying times incorrectly, as they receive the default timezone value of UTC - [0] - and I couldn't find a way around it. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330890 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330890
      • smichel17 6y ago
        That's a feature, not a bug. Your time zone is one of the ways you can be fingerprinted. That said, it wouldn't hurt to split it out into a different about:config preference. I'd probably disable it since I don't use a vpn so my time zone can be deduced from my IP anyway.
        • stuartd 6y ago
          I know it’s a feature, but even sites which allow you to set a timezone (eg Slack) still displayed times incorrectly. It was a tradeoff I was not prepared to make.
    • floatingatoll 6y ago
      If you’re considering resistFingerprinting, you might be better off using Tor Browser, which maximizes fingerprinting protections regardless of breakage to websites. I believe that the Tor folks share patches sometimes that get integrated into the Firefox rF pref, but you would only want to enable rF if you’re looking for the best possible protection regardless of other desires (such as addons or fonts or being able to access all websites), and for that, there’s Tor Browser. (Or, if you’re just interested in helping advance the anti-tracking ecosystem! In which case you can test resistFingerprinting and file Webcompat issues when you encounter them — but be sure to mention that resistFingerprinting is enabled or your issues will probably be closed “unable to reproduce”.)
      • danShumway 6y ago
        You're right, a lot of the resistFingerprinting features are being uplifted (with some modifications) directly from Tor. There are a couple ways of looking at this, and more than one of them are valid. The first is, like you said, that resistFingerprinting can be kind of a gateway to Tor in general, since Tor will do everything resistFingerprinting does, and better. The second is that uplifting Tor features to "normal" browsers and allowing "normal" users to enable them makes it harder for website operators to say, "well, I don't need to worry about this because it's just Tor users and they're all criminals." Right now, enabling these features in Firefox will result in some website breakage, but as more people say, "well, this is a mainstream browser thing", maybe more website operators will start to accommodate the protections. I think there's value in continuing to blur the line between Tor and other browsers, if only to push the idea that the kind of privacy protections Tor offers should be available to everyone across multiple browsers. Not to mention that it's nice to be able to take advantage of a few Tor features while still getting stuff like fast video streaming. But agreed, there's definitely a continuum here, and it might be valuable for some people to explore farther down it.
• PhantomGremlin 6y ago
  Protip #3: when all else fails, they will use your IP address to target you. E.g. I usually use Firefox with NoScript. I frequently exit Firefox; when I do I clear everything using "Clear history when Firefox closes". When I want to visit a site that requires JavaScript I switch to Safari. I'm just as aggressive in Safari in clearing my history. Consequently, about the only ads I do see (in Safari) are clothing ads for teenage girls. I have two teenage girls, they have their own computers, so it must be the shared IP address. So far it hasn't been worth the hassle for me to switch to a new IP address from Comcast more than about once a year. By default my firewall asks for the same IP address and even if it didn't, Comcast will use my firewall's MAC address to give me the same IP address.
  • bradly 6y ago
    Protip #4: I use Forget Me Now to whitelist sites I want to save cookies for after closing tabs. You'd be surprised how few websites you actually need to save cookies for. I thought it would be way more hassle than it ended up being.
    • smichel17 6y ago
      Yeah. I use Temporary Containers to do the same (with permanent containers as my whitelist). I also have 3rd party cookies blocked entirely. Recently I also set uMatrix to block 1st party cookies. Yes, I need to re-enable them relatively often, but I've been surprised at how often I simply don't need them.
    • asddubs 6y ago
      i use cookie autodelete, and i think i have two sites whitelisted
• surround 6y ago
  While these addons may help against help prevent some fingerprinting attempts, they do not adequately reduce the fingerprint to be non-unique. They certainly won’t hurt, though (many websites just take a hash of the canvas). It’s very difficult to have a non-unique fingerprint. Your browser would have to be the exactly the same as a bunch of other people. At the moment (AFAIK), this is only possible with Tor (all Tor users have the same browser fingerprint.) You don’t have to worry about this too much, though. Firefox and uBlock Origin blacklist many fingerprinting scripts.
  • corford 6y ago
    This is a handy site to get a feel for how unique you are: https://amiunique.org/fp https://amiunique.org/fp Some other useful ones for seeing what you're leaking: https://www.bromite.org/detect https://www.bromite.org/detect https://www.doileak.com/ https://www.doileak.com/ https://www.deviceinfo.me https://www.deviceinfo.me http://fp.virpo.sk/ http://fp.virpo.sk/
    • OrwellianChild 6y ago
      I wish this was helpful, but amiunique.org calls out the values for canvas, fonts, etc. as unique when running the blockers. Maybe this is because it's randomizing every time, but it makes the amiunique test pretty flawed...
      • corford 6y ago
        amiunique.org is just a database of fingerprints (size of which is governed by however much traffic they get). If you're showing up as unique it's either because: 1. your blockers are randomising each time 2. your blockers aren't blocking everything and what's left is still enough to uniquely fingerprint you against the database of fingerprints they have. If it's 1 above, that's fine. If it's 2, you may need more (or better) blockers. Also, it obviously helps from the get go if you're on a bog standard platform like Windows and using FF.
    • surround 6y ago
• lebaux 6y ago
  I'm using vivaldi, and it seems that https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-fingerprint-me/nhbedikkbkakbjipijipejfojanppbfg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-fingerprint-m... extension is able to block most of the fingerprinting attempts. If you guys know about better "plug-in" solution, please let me know. I don't want to sacrifice basic comfort of browsing though, like disabling .js, wiping everything on browser restart or diddling with uMatrix on every website.
  • DavideNL 6y ago
    The way I read their product description the extension does not block anything at all. It only detects fingerprinting? "Dont FingerPrint Me (DFPM) is a browser devtools extension for detecting browser fingerprinting."
  • smichel17 6y ago
    I made a nicely written comment, then accidentally deleted it, so here's the super pithy version with examples omitted, since I don't want to retype on my phone. I use uMatrix with strict defaults for privacy. I agree diddling is annoying. I find diddling with sites more annoying.
    • asddubs 6y ago
      it does make you appreciate it a lot more when someone has their shit together, if the site works with noscript and doesn't pull in scripts from 20 different hosts
      • smichel17 6y ago
        I was super impressed with https://shop.balance.com/ https://shop.balance.com/ recently (actually the site is run by worldpantry.com) — I made it though the entire checkout flow with no js and no third party resources. An e-commerce site!! They're normally the absolute worst.
• rumpels 6y ago
  "They will kill fingerprinting and as a proof, " No they don't. But they help a little. Here are some of mine in my privacy browser: BP Privacy Block all Font and Glyph Detection Canvas Blocker Clear URLS Cockiebro Decentraleyes I don't care about cockies NoScrupt Privacy Settings Privacy Oriented Origin Policy Startpage ublock origin WebTRC Control HTTPS Everywhere And as a bonus, not really related: Bypass Paywalls Clean Also use a host file manager. I use host flash Most important thing: use many many browser. I have chrome for Facebook, Banking sites and Booking travel tickets (Trust me, you don't wat to do this with you privacy broswer). I have chromium for gmail I use firefox with all the plug-ins for webbrowsing opera with build in VPN for some other stuff (carefull, owned by Chinese) Vivaldi There is also blue moon. There are many browser out there. Another option would be to use virtual machines with seperate VPNs.
  • nnt38 6y ago
    > in my privacy browser Why are you reinventing the Tor browser?