[HN Gopher] Why is fingerprint.com browser fingerprint working s...
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       Why is fingerprint.com browser fingerprint working so well with
       iPhones?
        
       Author : throwaway202302
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2023-02-26 21:15 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fingerprint.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fingerprint.com)
        
       | throwaway202302 wrote:
       | Dear HN, maybe you know.
       | 
       | This is about precision of browser fingerprinting.
       | 
       | fingerprint.com generates a hash from browser/os attributes to
       | recognize users without cookies. I tried their demo using iphone
       | and expected (because i use private mode and returned several
       | times with hopefully different cookie) to see some entries from
       | other iphones like my one pop up in my history (from the fuzzy
       | matching;
       | https://www.apple.com/safari/docs/Safari_White_Paper_Nov_201...
       | has some sentence about fingerprint prevention) but there were no
       | other. I was alone and it traced me well. It was immune to
       | private relay on/off (geodata).
       | 
       | They claim 99.5% accuracy for fingerprint pro. From the docs
       | (https://dev.fingerprint.com/docs/understanding-our-995-accur...)
       | it seems to me that 99.5% is overall accuracy for the hosted
       | service and that number might be inflated by all the reference
       | calls generated by devices that never clean their cookies (these
       | count as 100%) The fraction of these is undisclosed, but its most
       | likely very high(?).
       | 
       | I had, so far believed that it is more difficult to fingerprint a
       | mobile safari than a desktop or android, because there is not so
       | much hardware variety. Canvas/audio fingerprint should mainly
       | depend on the phone's model, and so are the fonts? (can apps
       | bring new fonts to the fingerprint?)
       | 
       | Yet the demo of fingerprint.com performs pretty well for me. I do
       | not know if its a problem of my safari leaking something or
       | whether I am the only current user of the demo and therefore have
       | no other peers to compare against. It seems a general problem
       | also on sites like amiunique.org that almost nobody uses them.
       | amiunique reports current iphone user agent as having a 0.4%
       | fraction in last 15 days; but there are millions of these phones
       | out there?
       | 
       | First I thought its my cookies but safari is indeed in private
       | mode and e.g. samy.pl/evercookie test shows different digits each
       | visit.
       | 
       | Anybody has some link/test tool especially crafted for
       | iphone/ipad fingerprint or has some know-how of the "secret
       | sauce" of fingerprint.com et al and would like to share? i would
       | like to know how my iphone SE is different from other iphone SE.
       | how to find out? Do you see conflicting peers on fingerprint.com
       | demo when using it with iphone?
       | 
       | Thanks a lot.
        
         | jonas-w wrote:
         | I don't have an iPhone so i can't test it, but one thing i
         | would be interested in is, if you use another browser like
         | chrome/firefox etc, do you also get the same ID?
         | 
         | On my android different browsers yield different IDs but
         | private mode or clearing browser data doesn't change anything.
        
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       (page generated 2023-02-26 23:01 UTC)