4 ms·

Crazy, in a way, that it wasn't already this way from the beginning.

gfaster 4y ago
imo it's more crazy that people thought of tracking users by using a font in the first place. The level of human ingenuity that has gone into spying on people is staggering.
- greyhair 4y ago
  Follow the money. It is always about the money. I was at a corporate security conference where one of the speakers stated that organized crime groups hire the top mathematicians and computer scientists from the top universities every year. They provide them with laboratories that you wish your company could afford.
  - regentbowerbird 4y ago
    Did the speaker have a source for that claim beyond their own word? Surely there would be issues with such a scheme.
enkrs 4y ago
The web and ideas back then were different. It was so cool to choose wingdings as a font, and make it <blink>. The web would not have evolved the way it is now if we hadn’t had the freedom back then.
bagpuss 4y ago
many years ago, too many fonts would cripple an average Windows install.
layer8 4y ago
There weren’t any good permissibly-licenced fonts available back then, and browser fingerprinting only became a thing a decade or so later.
lelandfe 4y ago
WebKit/Safari gets dunked on a lot for being slow to implement features (sometimes rightfully so), but for many features, this is exactly why. Check out this long list of APIs they're purposefully dragging their feet on out of privacy concerns: https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#table-of-contents-toggle:~:text=Here%20are%20some%20examples%20of%20features%20we%20have%20decided%20to%20not%20yet%20implement%20due%20to%20fingerprinting%2C%20security%2C%20and%20other%20concerns%2C%20and%20where%20we%20do%20not%20yet%20see%20a%20path%20to%20resolving%20those%20concerns https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#table-of-contents-to...
- SahAssar 4y ago
  Many of those are gated behind permissions in the browsers that have implemented them, and safari could gate the rest too. Or they could collaborate with the working groups to reduce the fingerprinting hazard. Many other features that safari has been late with have basically no fingerprinting usefulness like web push.

imo it's more crazy that people thought of tracking users by using a font in the first place. The level of human ingenuity that has gone into spying on people is staggering.

greyhair 4y ago
Follow the money. It is always about the money. I was at a corporate security conference where one of the speakers stated that organized crime groups hire the top mathematicians and computer scientists from the top universities every year. They provide them with laboratories that you wish your company could afford.
- regentbowerbird 4y ago
  Did the speaker have a source for that claim beyond their own word? Surely there would be issues with such a scheme.

enkrs 4y ago

The web and ideas back then were different. It was so cool to choose wingdings as a font, and make it <blink>. The web would not have evolved the way it is now if we hadn’t had the freedom back then.

bagpuss 4y ago

many years ago, too many fonts would cripple an average Windows install.

layer8 4y ago

There weren’t any good permissibly-licenced fonts available back then, and browser fingerprinting only became a thing a decade or so later.

lelandfe 4y ago

WebKit/Safari gets dunked on a lot for being slow to implement features (sometimes rightfully so), but for many features, this is exactly why. Check out this long list of APIs they're purposefully dragging their feet on out of privacy concerns: https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#table-of-contents-toggle:~:text=Here%20are%20some%20examples%20of%20features%20we%20have%20decided%20to%20not%20yet%20implement%20due%20to%20fingerprinting%2C%20security%2C%20and%20other%20concerns%2C%20and%20where%20we%20do%20not%20yet%20see%20a%20path%20to%20resolving%20those%20concerns https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#table-of-contents-to...

SahAssar 4y ago
Many of those are gated behind permissions in the browsers that have implemented them, and safari could gate the rest too. Or they could collaborate with the working groups to reduce the fingerprinting hazard. Many other features that safari has been late with have basically no fingerprinting usefulness like web push.