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Yes and no. If you go for a stock browser without changing anything - that means you can't install ublock origin, or noscript, or adjust the cookie settings.

Yes and no. If you go for a stock browser without changing anything - that means you can't install ublock origin, or noscript, or adjust the cookie settings. If the fingerprint detects you're running your browser in a VM? Because your canvas/webgl stuff reveals a graphics card that is only seen on VMs, or your mouse movement is characteristic of the way host OSes pass mouse movement to guest OSes? That's an unusual characteristic. If you freeze the VM and everyone else installs updates? Your configuration will gradually become unusual because of its age. And of course if you've got a 4k screen but you run your VM at 1920x1080, the gain in anonymity has come at the cost of most of your screen real estate. Also, if you do manage to completely resist tracking by IP address, by cookies, and by browser fingerprints? Your reward is that Cloudflare and Google ReCaptcha will give you endless tedious challenges. ReCaptcha has a special extra-slow mode, specifically to punish people like you. I hope you like clicking fire hydrants!

LegionMammal978 2y ago
FWIW, I've used a stock Windows VM + Chrome a few times for testing things. Of course you don't freeze it solid, you just take a snapshot before installing the browser, and revert to that snapshot whenever you want to update the OS. For the screen real-estate issue, just get a VM viewer that doesn't insist on showing the full screen. You also don't block cookies every second, you just wipe them regularly. The Captcha services don't particularly care, since obviously they don't want to punish people on a fresh system. They care far, far more about whether I'm going through a commercial VPN, doubly so if I'm using Tor. But if I'm really worried about IP tracking, I usually run it through my university network. Of course, a sufficiently-motivated fingerprinting service can surmount any barrier in theory, with typographic analysis and whatnot. But in practice, websites tend not to care to an extraordinary extent. E.g., I remember one person who was convinced that Google/YouTube used your specific IP address (not just your cookies, or your geo-IP location) as a major part of ad targeting. But lo and behold, the whole VM setup consistently gave me a generic set of ads, as did just wiping my browser cookies. Of course, their explanation was "Of course they're detecting that you're trying to sniff them out, so they're only giving you generic ads to uphold the conspiracy!" As if cookies + geo-IP weren't more than enough for 99.9% of users they want to display ads to.

LegionMammal978 2y ago

FWIW, I've used a stock Windows VM + Chrome a few times for testing things. Of course you don't freeze it solid, you just take a snapshot before installing the browser, and revert to that snapshot whenever you want to update the OS. For the screen real-estate issue, just get a VM viewer that doesn't insist on showing the full screen. You also don't block cookies every second, you just wipe them regularly. The Captcha services don't particularly care, since obviously they don't want to punish people on a fresh system. They care far, far more about whether I'm going through a commercial VPN, doubly so if I'm using Tor. But if I'm really worried about IP tracking, I usually run it through my university network. Of course, a sufficiently-motivated fingerprinting service can surmount any barrier in theory, with typographic analysis and whatnot. But in practice, websites tend not to care to an extraordinary extent. E.g., I remember one person who was convinced that Google/YouTube used your specific IP address (not just your cookies, or your geo-IP location) as a major part of ad targeting. But lo and behold, the whole VM setup consistently gave me a generic set of ads, as did just wiping my browser cookies. Of course, their explanation was "Of course they're detecting that you're trying to sniff them out, so they're only giving you generic ads to uphold the conspiracy!" As if cookies + geo-IP weren't more than enough for 99.9% of users they want to display ads to.