[HN Gopher] The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
___________________________________________________________________
The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
Author : ingve
Score : 353 points
Date : 2025-11-22 17:08 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kevinboone.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (kevinboone.me)
| ArcHound wrote:
| You missed one of our best guarded secrets: ja3 hashes and their
| successors.
|
| Basically, we can identify browsers based on the supported
| ciphers in TLS handshake (order matters too AFAIK). Then when
| your declared identity is not matching the ja3 hash, you're
| automatically suspicious, if not blocked right away. I think
| that's the reason for so many Capchas.
| 1over137 wrote:
| What's ja3?
| ArcHound wrote:
| Here you go:
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additional-
| configurat...
|
| It's a better explanation that I can provide.
| eurekin wrote:
| Oh! Now I wonder, if crowdsec could issue bans based on
| that
| peetistaken wrote:
| I built a nice tool to visualize that: https://tls.peet.ws. Its
| not that secret anymore though, more and more libraries are
| starting to allow spoofing for browser tls configs. There isnt
| really a cat/mouse game here - once you match the latest
| chrome, there is nothing to fingerprint
| johnisgood wrote:
| I do not think I understand that website. I see that JA3
| always gets changed after refresh, but not sure what JA3 is.
| Why is it always different, and is it good or bad?
| Retr0id wrote:
| Modern browsers randomise parts of the handshake, which
| results in an unstable ja3. ja4 and others normalize the
| relevant details to make the fingerprint constant again.
| johnisgood wrote:
| How effective is it at "un-anonymizing" me? I value
| privacy. What do you think I can do about "any" of this?
| Retr0id wrote:
| It tends to identify your platform/browser version, with
| relatively low granularity. Unless you have an unusually
| rare OS/browser config, it won't deanon you on on its
| own. But it can be combined with other fingerprinting
| vectors.
| mike_d wrote:
| JA3/JA4 are useless now.
|
| At best they identify the family of browser, and spoofing it is
| table stakes for bad actors. https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-
| impersonate
| ArcHound wrote:
| Slight correction: Spoofing it is table stakes for ever so
| slightly capable actors.
|
| These will still help against the masses of dumb actors
| flooding your stuff.
| dringov wrote:
| > _Worst of all, perhaps, it can extract a canvas fingerprint.
| Canvas fingerprinting works by having the browser run code that
| draws text (perhaps invisibly), and then retrieving the
| individual pixel data that it drew. This pixel data will differ
| subtly from one system to another, even drawing the same text,
| because of subtle differences in the graphics hardware and the
| operating system._
|
| I am concerned about the detail here: does this mean per hardware
| class (e.g. same model of GPU), or per each individual device?
|
| Is the implication that there are certain graphical operations
| that - perhaps unintentionally - end up becoming akin to a
| physically unclonable function in hardware?
| Xelbair wrote:
| >I am concerned about the detail here: does this mean per
| hardware class (e.g. same model of GPU), or per each individual
| device?
|
| per combination of hardware(GPU, resolution of display) and
| software(exact drivers)
| sfink wrote:
| I have heard of such things. The signal is not persistent over
| time, since it's dependent on eg heat and concurrent
| operations. But it's there, to some degree, and can be
| correlated over time somewhat.
|
| We've made our world a scary place.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| 10 years too late.
| doug_durham wrote:
| I agree with the points in the article. Fingerprinting of any
| kind is a major risk for personal freedom. At the same time I
| want to make sure that content creators are compensated for their
| work. Ad firms that employ fingerprinting stand between me and
| the content creator. That said, I'm not going to pay $5/month for
| every blog that I occasionally read. The ad based model provides
| a more streamlined approach to compensation, but at the
| unacceptable price of privacy. I'm not quite sure what the answer
| is.
| airstrike wrote:
| Pay $5/month to buy credits that let you read content behind
| that network. Every blog you read gets $0.10. Top up with
| credits if you run out.
|
| Sending emails costs $0.50.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Eh, that's too expensive unless the recipient can authorize
| refunds for non-spam emails.
|
| But yes, I always thought some form of network syndication
| would emerge on the Web, where creators could register for
| their share of aggregated periodic payments made by users.
|
| Still not sure why that's not a thing. I would pay $50/month
| to a syndicate in return for never having to deal with
| paywalls on any sites affiliated with them. But only as long
| as the vast majority of sites participated, and that is
| probably the showstopper, I guess. We'd end up paying 20
| different 'syndicates' for absolutely no good reason, just as
| we now have to deal with 20 different streaming services.
| ako wrote:
| I read from too many different sources through aggregators
| like hackernews. With a network you'd probably still have too
| many subscriptions.
|
| Also wonder if it will really work out, i open too many
| articles that are pretty bad when you start reading them. So
| i quit after 1 or 2 paragraphs.
|
| Now if you get the first 2 paragraphs for free, contents
| writers will start to optimize for good first 2 paragraphs,
| and afterwards quality will drop. Also, many blog posts or
| news articles don't have more than 2 paragraphs of good
| content.
| Xelbair wrote:
| how about donating to the creator directly? not subscription,
| just occasional donations whenever people feel like it -
| content is more widely available, and people who really enjoy
| it or are well off can actually fund the development
| lobsterthief wrote:
| Yes, but you need a scalable and low-friction donation
| solution. Patreon is the closest but it doesn't pay the bills
| for most creators. Maybe some micro-tipping solution, but
| nobody has made that work yet.
| voakbasda wrote:
| No one has made a successful micro-tipping solution,
| because regulations and entrenched interests (banks,
| payment processors) have too much control and assess per-
| transaction fees that dwarf the amounts that such a system
| would be designed send.
|
| Aggregation of tips and payouts would help, but that
| requires network effects (achievable only at scale) to be
| viable. I believe this approach has been tried in recent
| years, but I am not sure where those efforts went.
| txrx0000 wrote:
| If someone puts a donate button beside their name or in the
| corner of their webpage, and that button leads to a payment
| page, I think that's good enough.
|
| The point of paying creators is so that they can focus on
| creating content instead of making other things. Giving
| money to a creator is basically saying "you're so good at
| what you do, and it has so much cultural/intellectual
| value, I'd rather have you make content instead of stocking
| shelves or making food". But this should be reserved for
| people that publish good content because they can and are
| passionate about it, not just anyone putting out slop with
| the instrumental goal of paying their bills. If the
| friction of clicking a button and filling in payment
| details is enough to deter people from paying them, then
| maybe their content isn't worth paying for and they should
| find some other way to make a living instead.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I already pay my isp. Maybe they should work something out
| with them.
| norman784 wrote:
| Ads are annoying, but they are ok, what is not ok is collecting
| data and then selling it, so they can profile you without your
| consent across different platforms.
| prymitive wrote:
| > I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I
| occasionally read
|
| Would you pay per view? Most people (me included) would
| probably hesitate to say yes, because we're used to not paying
| for that. But what if it meant that ad based model is gone and
| everything you buy is cheaper because the price does not
| include the cost of running ads?
| morkalork wrote:
| Hard to say, there's no shortage of enticing looking medium
| articles that are superficial and worthless. I would not pay
| per view that trash even though there are good ones buried in
| the pile.
| Terretta wrote:
| "If you thought click-bait was bad before..."
| echelon_musk wrote:
| How do you track the views?
| imiric wrote:
| How do you track ad impressions?
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| I would. Or alternatively I'd also pay for a Spotify style
| model where my monthly amount get redistributed amongst the
| articles I read.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| At the risk of pedantry, though it's still germane to this
| context, that's more the Tidal model than the Spotify
| model.
|
| Spotify's model is more that your monthly amount gets
| disproportionately redistributed to the artists that bring
| more interest and listens to Spotify, regardless of whether
| you were one of those listeners. Smaller and niche artists
| suffer under Spotify's model.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _what if ... everything you buy is cheaper because the
| price does not include the cost of running ads?_
|
| Except in practice we see the opposite.
|
| There's something interesting going on with companies when
| they want to get paid directly versus by ads: they demand 3x
| - 4x or more for subscriptions or pay per view versus what
| they make from ads.
|
| Easiest place to see this is ad supported non-linear TV in
| the years you could get without ads, or with ads. You pay
| significantly more to not see the ads, than they make from
| the ads.
|
| Perhaps this is justified because ad-free subscriptions
| reduce the audience size for ad buys, but when you look at
| the numbers watching with ads versus paying, it wouldn't seem
| like the "no ads" buyers make a dent in whatever pricing
| tier.
|
| In the 90s when we were young and naive, we imagined a
| library card model, with a library fee and then you have
| fractions of a cent cost to read a post, and using (hand
| waving) technology to uncouple viewing history from payables
| to content creators. That, or the British TV license model,
| an Internet license of some kind.
|
| It's curious to me the ad networks haven't gotten together to
| preemptively offer this. Arguably Brave tried, but from an
| adversarial (to the ad companies) stance. It would work
| better from the inside with a simple regulation: if you serve
| ads for ad-supported content, you have to participate in the
| library card system at CPM rates no greater than you receive
| for ads to skip the ads for card holders.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| This is price discrimination. Everybody would love to
| charge more money to rich people and less money to poor
| people, since that increases the total profit.
|
| The only companies that we directly allow to do this are
| schools, but having a premium version lets you approximate
| this.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Steam also does this. Most games are significantly
| cheaper in low-income countries like mine because
| otherwise they wouldn't make a dime here.
| mh- wrote:
| Steam is not the one doing that. Publishers decide
| regional pricing.
| skydhash wrote:
| That's because you usually pay via credit card (or some
| other financial mean) which is cumbersome (and may be
| illegal) to spoof. But yeah, it can be hard to justify a
| subscription when it's the price of a full meal.
| Especially when other essential subscriptions
| (electricity, water, internet, cell services,...) is
| straining your monthly budget.
| notatoad wrote:
| The PPV model has been tried a bunch of times, and it always
| turns out that the rate people are willing to pay per view is
| not a rate that is high enough to be a viable revenue source
| for the content owners.
|
| it takes a _lot_ of $0.10-$0.25 views to make up for the loss
| of a $5 /month recurring revenue stream that might last for
| years.
| imiric wrote:
| The fact that advertising is more profitable doesn't mean
| that the PPV model is not viable. It could certainly be so.
| Every site could set their own price, or specific tiers,
| which users can agree to, just like they do with
| subscription-based content today.
|
| The problem is skewed incentives, of course. Advertising is
| acceptable to most users and easy to integrate, so why
| should website authors go out of their way to please a
| minority of their users who object to it?
| levocardia wrote:
| Do you think the fact that NO major content websites
| (NYT, substack, WSJ, ...) have settled on a PPV model is
| simply because they haven't thought of it? Or is it more
| likely that the numbers absolutely do not work?
| imiric wrote:
| That's a false dichotomy.
|
| I can't speak for all web sites, but I reckon a
| combination of factors could explain why such a solution
| hasn't been deployed:
|
| 1. Advertising is ubiquitous, easy to integrate, and
| provides a safe revenue stream.
|
| 2. There is little to no infrastructure for the PPV
| model. Whoever builds it would need to maintain their own
| version of it.
|
| 3. People expect the web to be "free". This is even true
| within technical crowds who understand that it's really
| not free. And a large part of that group doesn't mind
| advertising.
|
| So, really, it would require a substantial amount of
| effort to implement, it would add additional friction to
| users, and ultimately only a minority would appreciate
| it.
|
| Had this model been in place from the beginning of the
| web, things might be different today. Alas, if my grandma
| had wheels...
| fragmede wrote:
| Have any of them actually tried it though? If they have
| and I missed it, then I apologize, but I can't recall the
| NYT letting me read an article for $1 with zero friction
| via Apple or Google Pay or Stripe link or something. It
| they tried it and the numbers didn't work, that's one
| thing, but I don't recall that happening.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Doing it via conventional card networks won't work, the
| fees would eat most/all of the payment.
|
| A critical mass of publishers would need to team up and
| form a cooperative/etc where a user could register once,
| deposit some money, and then that money would be spent
| every time they view an article. But that requires
| cooperation between competitors, which is already hard
| enough, and the cancer that is the advertising industry
| wouldn't like this potential existential threat and would
| be more than happy to pour fuel onto the fire to ensure
| it never succeeds.
|
| What's surprising is why the card networks themselves
| don't get in on it. They could do so in a completely
| backwards-compatible manner, introducing a new card
| number range that only works with transactions under a
| certain amount and have different fraud
| protection/chargeback rules.
| notatoad wrote:
| WSJ was available on blendle (pay-per-view
| microtransactions). Washington Post was available on
| scroll (monthly subscription, divided up amongst the
| publishers you read each month). neither service still
| exists.
|
| i don't believe NYT has ever tried a pay-per-view model.
| prymitive wrote:
| I think it might be because with ad model you can sell
| profiling data many times over to different parties. You
| can't do the same with a single charge.
| beeflet wrote:
| No one uses the PPV model because there isn't sufficient
| payment infrastructure (402 payment required). The
| friction for entering your credit card information into a
| website is ridiculous, you might as well target the high
| end of the market with a monthly subscription.
|
| The PPV model, like Ads, works well for websites that
| you're not well associated with. Random blogs and
| websites that you otherwise wouldn't be willing to share
| your credit card info with.
| notatoad wrote:
| >Every site could set their own price, or specific tiers,
| which users can agree to, just like they do with
| subscription-based content today.
|
| you're describing the model of a product called blendle,
| a service which i loved but which totally failed. they
| failed to attract users, and they failed to attract
| publishers. this isn't some new idea that nobody had
| tried. it's been done. and it failed, not just for
| blendle. people have tried micropayments, they've tried
| subscriptions, if you can imagine a PPV model, it's
| probably been tried. readers and publishers both hate it.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| I wrote about this exact problem last year. To anyone who
| disagrees, would you pay me 5 cents to click on the
| following link?
|
| https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| This is exactly what I want. I don't really care to subscribe
| to most written media (I do in some cases) but once in awhile
| an article grabs my attention and I would shell out to read
| it.
| imiric wrote:
| Brave Inc. gets a lot of flack, some warranted, but their
| Basic Attention Token allows for exactly this. Users can add
| credit to their wallet by either consuming privacy-friendly
| ads _or_ topping it up manually, which then gets distributed
| to the sites they visit in the proportion they choose,
| transparently in the background while they browse.
|
| It is a shame that this feature gets lumped together with
| claims of crypto scams, and similar nonsense. Yet this is
| precisely the right model that could work at scale to
| eliminate the advertising middleman, and make the web a safer
| and more enjoyable experience for everyone.
| fragmede wrote:
| It's frustrating that humans are stoichastic parrots and
| the minute you mention crypto they go into conniptions
| because the rails are basically there. It's not user
| friendly, but it's possible to build a system where you
| transfer $0.05 cents of crypto to someone as you scroll
| down a web page using a special browser.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Brave strips out the ads that the creators put on their
| site, puts their own ads there, then gives the creators
| _some_ of that money if and only if the creator realizes
| they have to sign up for Brave 's cryptoshit. It's
| straightforwardly the kind of racket that would get your
| knees broken if you tried to do it to somebody in real
| life, but "it's ok because it's on computers". All the flak
| is deserved.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| But then again, online ads are the physical equivalent of
| a crowd of paparazzi following you 24/7 including inside
| your home, which would also prompt physical violence in
| the real world.
|
| From my perspective I couldn't care less if one bad guy
| is stealing from another bad guy.
| jcynix wrote:
| > Would you pay per view?
|
| Yes, but only after viewing, of else I'd pay for "editorial"
| or AI generated slop which would be generated like link farms
| pointing to Amazon etc.
|
| And that's the chicken-and-egg problem ...
|
| In theory that could be resolved by registering for free at
| reputable sites and then paying per view with micropayments.
| Or by a scheme where one would register and only pay when I
| actually did read stuff, not with the currently en-vogue
| monthly fee for each and every site.
| stackghost wrote:
| You're presupposing that these blogs are producing content
| worth paying for. The unfortunate truth is that the
| overwhelming majority of blogs (99.9%+) are not.
| beeflet wrote:
| The PPV model can at least cover the cost of bandwidth. If
| you are loading the page, it must be at least some value to
| the user, say 1/10th of a cent.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Then why is everyone so nostalgic for the old days of the
| blogosphere to return? If blogs are all worthless, then we
| shouldn't care that they're disappearing and/or being put
| behind paywalls; we haven't lost anything.
| tgv wrote:
| They don't get $5 per month from ads. So the true subscription
| price must be a lot lower.
|
| One option: a fund where you buy tokens, that you can spend
| reading an article. That will, however, lead to more clickbait
| and AI slop and snowing under serious blogs with low volume.
| Bjartr wrote:
| This micro payments for content idea has been tried a few
| times, with slight variations. No-one has cracked the problem
| yet. But maybe one day
| ericd wrote:
| I know HN doesn't love crypto, but this kind of thing seems
| promising for finally cracking micropayments:
| https://www.x402.org/
| kasabali wrote:
| > I'm not quite sure what the answer is.
|
| It's very simple, it's what they've been doing in print media
| for centuries: contextual advertising.
| gedy wrote:
| Yes seriously - I'm old enough to have enjoy reading
| magazines that had ads throughout them. They were fine.
|
| I'd venture to say contextual advertising would be more
| effective than whatever we've been trying to squeeze out of
| fingerprinting etc. All this supposed "data" they are
| gathering feels like a scam perpetuated by ad companies about
| how important it is to the people who buy ads. It's not.
|
| Even Facebook and Instagram, which pretty much should know
| you to a tee is completely ineffectual at advertising to me -
| like at all.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Same here. By the time I was old enough to have an income,
| reading comics had already made it possible for me to -not
| even see _any_ - advertising. That carried over to
| newspapers, magazines... all those advertisers were wasting
| their money.
|
| Later on in life I got pissed at cable-TV advertisers
| shoved into my favorite movies every 5-10 minutes ...
| ruining any ambience or artistic merit in them ... so I got
| rid of cable TV. By the time analog TV went away, I'd got
| rid of my television set. No return address on an envelope?
| junk mail, into the garbage unopened.
|
| Now the pollution's ruined the 'net ... it's YouTube (re-
| routed) and some websites (blocked). So long, boing-boing
| and wired and your 'native ads'. Sites demand subscription?
| blocked. How much longer before advertisers realize how
| much they're getting ripped off?
| sfink wrote:
| > Sites demand subscription? blocked.
|
| Odd. In the midst of a (well-deserved) anti-ad rant, you
| throw in the primary non-ad alternative and discard it.
|
| > How much longer before advertisers realize how much
| they're getting ripped off?
|
| A while longer, if the same people who reject ads are
| also the people who reject alternatives to ads. The
| advertisers can safely ignore those people's opinions.
|
| (I'm not saying subscriptions are the answer. I don't
| have an answer. I'm just saying that companies wanting
| subscription money is not part of the problem where
| companies want to shove ads in our faces 24/7.)
| Vinnl wrote:
| Print media did also include e.g. coupons with discount codes
| with which advertisers could learn which lead led through a
| sale.
| Retric wrote:
| Without any transactions or user tracking it's difficult to
| separate 'legitimate' content farms from those using bot
| farms to boost their page views.
|
| Print media was also trying to guarantee their audience was
| an actual person by charging nominal fees, the difference
| was how much info required to do so.
| hedora wrote:
| The main "problem" with contextualized advertising is that
| the people producing the content get a larger share of the ad
| spend.
|
| Targeted ads concentrate control over the market into a few
| players, which can do things like acquire competitors or run
| them out of business with loss leaders.
|
| With AI, the supply of ad real estate will go to infinity, so
| the only thing that will matter is the quality of the places
| the ads run.
|
| This would be a good time to ban targeted advertising, or for
| the content producers to form a cartel that only purchases
| contextual ads.
|
| That cartel will probably be even worse than what we have
| now, since it's going to be 2-3 mega conglomerates like
| Disney, and they already have handed editorial control over
| to the White House.
|
| Hopefully the invisible hand of capitalism will somehow fix
| this.
| yegle wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor was the ideal
| solution IMHO.
| txrx0000 wrote:
| We could normalize paying content creators directly. So instead
| of paywalls or ads, we get "donate" buttons.
| jwr wrote:
| > content creators are compensated for their work
|
| I have a gut feeling that we've been tricked (by ad companies)
| into thinking that this is somehow realistic and that casual
| "content creators" can get meaningful money from us reading
| their articles.
|
| Realistically, while professional content creators can make a
| living, writing a blog post every once in a while will not
| provide meaningful income. Instead of trying to "monetize"
| everything, we would be better off with free content like on
| the internet of old. There are other means of making money.
|
| It seems that the current situation means that the "content
| creators" earn insignificant money, while ad companies earn
| huge money because of scale, and we all somehow keep believing
| that this is necessary for content to appear.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| You mean I shouldn't make a comfortable living off my
| valuable HN comments? I was about to consider this comment a
| good days work. Maybe if I put this comment on my own webpage
| it would be more valuable?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide
| meaningful income
|
| Nor, generally, should it. Sitting down one or two Saturday
| afternoons a month to write a blog post shouldn't be
| generating the income of a FTE.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Allow me a second to play Devil's Advocate.
|
| What if it could? Or should (be able to produce FTE or
| close income)?
|
| In that world, the amount of pointless shite - questing to
| "go viral" - would be reduced to near zero. That is, if the
| incentive were more quality, and less quantity, we'd be
| better off, yes?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| So there's an element of truth to that. And there are
| those who can contribute enough value, have enough
| audience, etc., that they can "coast" on those 2 blog
| posts a month and make significant income...
|
| ... but that's also not, nor should it be the median. I'm
| not sure how the economy functions if, say 8h/mo effort
| generates a median living wage.
| o11c wrote:
| Tbf in a post-scarcity society, that _should_ be
| expected, if historical inertia doesn 't prevent it.
| sfink wrote:
| That's tempting, but I still don't think it should. There
| would still be the quest to go viral. "Quality" would
| still be determined in the aggregate, which means that
| your income depends on appealing to the widest audience
| possible, which means high quality niche bloggers still
| don't get paid much.
|
| Metrics are hard. Just making sure they reward one
| particular desired outcome doesn't mean you'll escape the
| unintended consequences.
|
| Also, note that we are past the point of being able to
| reasonably able to manage any of this. Today, you'd need
| to come up with a reward function that cannot be
| maximized by AI. (And lest you think you can fix that by
| using site visitors to evaluate, most of them will be
| bots too.)
| beeflet wrote:
| The Ad model is exactly the problem. If you had anonymous,
| cheap micropayments where you pay 1 cent per pageview it would
| not just solve the surveillance problem but it would solve the
| DDoS problem too (you set up a web server where the price
| increases with load and clients bid for bandwidth).
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Sadly, I think you are wrong. Micropayments seem attractive
| but the idea falls apart quickly - there are just too many
| intractable non-technical problems. It has been tried more
| than once and each effort has failed.
|
| I wrote a longer post on this[0] but to save you the click I
| will state the biggest problem from a privacy point of view -
| if you think privacy is bad now with ads imagine how much
| worse it would be with a payment processor knowing your every
| click.
|
| Yes, I know about certain cryptocurrencies that maintain
| privacy, they are a non-starter for micropayments for
| different reasons.
|
| Even if a magically technical solution to privacy were to
| emerge there is nothing more valuable than information about
| paying customers and sites would use browser fingerprinting
| anyway.
|
| [0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html
| beeflet wrote:
| I think it is a technical problem. If you could integrate
| payment channels on top of private cryptocurrencies that
| would be enough. Even without the lightning network and
| just direct 1-to-1 payment channels, it would work.
|
| The article you lists assumes a "conventional" credit card
| system with chargebacks, massive fees, etc. which makes
| micropayments ecosystem impractical in the first place.
| Proposals for micro-payment systems usually describe a way
| top enable low-fee payments.
|
| The author doesn't take into account modern cryptocurrency
| tech like payment channels. I really doubt that payments
| have a natural fixed floor of 10s of cents - Payment
| providers charge these fees simply because they are in a
| natural monopoly position, thanks to lock-in and
| regulation. The need to control fraud is caused by
| regulatory requirements, which are in turn caused by
| monopolization.
|
| Despite being technologically less efficient, even
| traditional cryptocurrency payments are cheaper than bank
| transfer fees due to competition and low regulation.
|
| Secondly, you assume that no one wants to do micropayments.
| The infrastructure doesn't exist for it yet. If you don't
| build it, they will not come.
|
| As for browser fingerprinting, it can be solved on the
| client side with enough effort. Look at tor browser. Just
| have a system where cookies, WebGL, etc. are opt in on a
| browser level in the same way that WebUSB is. Artificially
| limit the performance of javascript to prevent bench-
| marking. I think it is possible to solve this
| architecturally.
|
| Check it out!
|
| https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels
|
| https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
|
| Also, there are GNU Taler/Chaumian cash type systems that
| inherit the efficiency of centralized systems with an added
| privacy benefit.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| > If you could integrate payment channels on top of
| private cryptocurrencies that would be enough.
|
| That "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
|
| But my point is that even if a magical technical solution
| existed tomorrow then the same sites that collect data
| for ads would continue to do so for the much more
| valuable data on paying users.
| Neikius wrote:
| Do you see how the discourse has been shifted here? Some of us
| have nothing against ads per-se. We care about tracking.
|
| How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform
| better? In my case it does not. As the tracked ads are usually
| worse as they will keep advertising me things I don't need
| anymore. Context based ads worked fine in the past and I don't
| really see why they cannot.
|
| Also why does every web store need to show me ads? Don't they
| make money out of selling things? If they really have to, do
| they have to invade privacy? This is like walking into a
| physical store and them doing facial recognition, then showing
| you tailored ads/inventory. That feels creepy to me.
| fragmede wrote:
| > How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads
| perform better?
|
| If you don't want to be tracked, you shouldn't be, but how
| could it not? At a very simple level, an ad targeted towards
| a 50 year old woman isn't going to be the same ad to show a
| 14 year old boy. Different people like different things and
| ads targeting you as an advertising profile are going to be
| better than ones that aren't. You may not like the targeting
| and think it's invasive, because it is, but let's not pretend
| the tracking doesn't do something.
| balamatom wrote:
| >And even though my personal safety and liberty probably aren't
| at stake, I don't want to give any support to the global
| advertising behemoth, by allowing advertisers access to better
| information about me.
|
| Giving the surveillance economy access to your habits means
| making them slightly better informed about _everyone_. That won
| 't directly endanger you; the SE will just become slightly better
| informed about how people like you function.
|
| This will enable it to increase the amount of risk faced by some
| other person that you will never hear of (and vice versa) if any
| of you is even suspected of endangering the SE, in proportion to
| the risk to the SE which people like you may hypothetically pose,
| as quantified by the methods of nepotism-powered pseudoscience.
| abigail95 wrote:
| To extend the closing remarks from a SIGINT perspective, sure
| some fingerprints are non unique and short lived, have little
| data. But hang onto it long enough and sure enough some slower
| data from another band might eventually correlate it with
| something else.
|
| The last time I looked at this seriously I was trying to find out
| how much fidelity (if it was possible at all) was necessary to
| identify someone by their mouse and keyboard input.
|
| It's not just what you do but how you do it.
| prng2021 wrote:
| How exactly do advertisers take fingerprints and translate that
| to targeted ads for each user?
| xnx wrote:
| The browser history is collected across multiple sites to form
| a profile. If the user ever enters their email address or logs
| in, their entire history is deanonymized.
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| A combo of your IP, browser fingerprint plus the fact that you
| logged in somewhere and that links to your actual name etc.
| Identify you in isolation is not very useful. It's connecting
| that identity to another place that's valuable.
| lilsoso wrote:
| Thanks for the browser recommendations.
|
| I switched to the Mullvad browser. The other recommendation,
| LibreWolf, provides the following warning on install which scared
| me away: "Warning: librewolf has been deprecated because it does
| not pass the macOS Gatekeeper check! It will be disabled on
| 2026-09-01."
| Y_Y wrote:
| Sounds like you need to switch OS
| mike_d wrote:
| The article rants about how turning off JavaScript is actually
| harmful because it makes you more fingerprintable, then in the
| same breath recommend switching to an obscure browser nobody
| else uses?
|
| If you want to avoid being uniquely identifiable stick to
| Chrome, signed into a Google account, running on a PC from Best
| Buy.
| undeveloper wrote:
| tldr -- it's fine. MacOS Gatekeeper will create warnings about
| products that are not signed via the apple developer program,
| which is $99/year librewolf is an open source product, that is
| very strictly a "community" libre / FOSS project. naturally,
| having an individual take up notarization assumedly, you are
| using brew -- brew recently decided to stop supporting /
| deprecate all casks that does not pass gatekeeper checks, for
| some reason I cannot fully determine.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Why would I trust any software that doesn't pass the
| gatekeeper test? Even if it claims to be "open source" with
| links to some code repo there is no guarantee the binary blob
| you are running was built using only that code and nothing
| else.
|
| Sure even with the gatekeeper test you can't be sure it's
| built against only the claimed code but it does guarantee _:
|
| 1) the binary hasn't been modified since it was signed 2) the
| binary was signed by somebody in possession of the private
| key 3) there is some measure of identification via Apple on
| who or what signed the binary 4) somebody was willing to fork
| over $99 to sign the binary
|
| It's not perfect security by any means but it is something.
| Otherwise the binary you are running might as well have come
| from some sketchy email attachment. And fuck that. Why would
| I want that on my machine?
|
| I get that the $99 might be a hurdle for "non-organized open
| source" (ie most open source... doesn't have a non-profit
| entity to take up the expense and credential management,
| etc...)... and there are probably ways apple could make it
| easier for such "collectives"... but ultimately I'd argue
| that signed binaries are good for everybody. While imperfect,
| they provide some form of traceability and accountability.
|
| _ obviously it's not a 100% guarantee of being fuckery-free.
| The private key might have been compromised, the appleid
| might have been hijacked and the developer program might have
| been enrolled with stolen credit cards... but it's still a
| hurdle to filter out a large swath of low effort nonsense.
| charlie-83 wrote:
| You could always just build it yourself from source if you
| are concerned.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Sure but most people aren't going to do that. It
| automatically limits the audience willing to use the
| software.
|
| This isn't an easy problem! I'd argue signed binaries are
| good for everybody... They are good for the end user
| because it provides some assurance the thing hasn't been
| tampered with and provides at least some form of audit
| history. It's good for the developers too! It ensures
| that users are running the binaries the dev intended them
| to run! It's good for the platform maker as it reduces
| the attack surface...
|
| The problem is... getting the keys to sign binaries
| requires getting a private key! And not just any key but
| one that been blessed somehow by something that all
| parties can trust. And trust isn't a technical problem
| but a meatspace human some. Apple solves it by requiring
| the dev to cough up 100USD and probably some other
| personal information. I have no idea how Ubuntu does it
| or Microsoft.... But something, somewhere has to bless
| that signing key.
| charlie-83 wrote:
| So for Linux, generally you are installing packages from
| your distro's repo so they are signed by the repo itself.
| I would have assumed that it would be the same on Mac
| with brew/macports/etc signing the code, but from what
| you are saying I guess not, I don't see why.
|
| Edit: Apparently Brew doesn't sign stuff because they
| don't trust the code they are being asked to sign.
| Apparently you can just get brew to build the package
| locally with `brew install --build-from-source librewolf`
| though which is useful.
|
| On windows you just need a certificate from a known
| authority. This will still probably cost you money but
| you have a lot more options at different price levels.
| Also that certificate is a widely useful thing rather
| than an apple dev account which is only useful in the
| apple walled garden.
| armadyl wrote:
| FYI I wouldn't say that the Mullvad browser is any better at
| anti-fingerprinting than Librewolf. I always point people to
| http://fingerprint.com/ so they can see how difficult it is to
| beat even JS based tracking and this doesn't even get into the
| server-side methods (i.e. just fetching a stylesheet) of
| tracking users.
|
| That's not to say you shouldn't use a browser that blocks ads
| etc but I don't think people should immediately think that
| they're not fingerprintable because they're running these.
| There definitely needs to be more discussion on the reality of
| how much these browsers can "protect" you.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| I mean... I don't give a fuck about fonts, I don't give a fuck
| about drawing shit to some canvas. Can I not just opt out?
|
| Yes, I know that's ski-mask bla bla bla, but I still don't want
| my browser to be doing this nonsense.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| There's the gemini protocol and gopher.
|
| When I think of all the tracking that goes on, these are
| becoming more lucrative.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Gemini and Gopher are better than the existing WWW, (although
| there are others as well, such as Spartan (uses the same file
| format as Gemini, but it is a different protocol without
| TLS), Scorpion (my own format, intended to be between Gemini
| and "WWW as it should be if it was designed better"), and
| others).
|
| However, you might also want to access HTTP and HTML, and to
| do so without needing to load fonts, pictures, etc; you might
| use a web browser that omits many of these features. However,
| it also can result in some problems; there are a few ways to
| work around some of these, such as adding your own scripts to
| handle some services, adding proxy services for handling some
| services (although some of these can use other protocols such
| as Gemini), and/or using the HTML/CSS commands in other ways
| (e.g. using ARIA to decide the formatting rather than using
| CSS). However, there are other issues, e.g. if the web page
| you download includes more junk than the actual main text.
| rcpt wrote:
| All this and I still need to click on the cookie pop ups like
| they'll bring the cargo planes to the island.
| bparsons wrote:
| Browser fingerprinting has been a thing since at least 2008.
| Kissmetrics was the first company I heard of that was doing this.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| The core of the problem is that we've made this behavior of "run
| javascript that pulls more javascript and then run that too" the
| default. Stallman was right, as always.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Does he have a strong stance of JS in the browser? In any case,
| I don't think many people would agree that the dubious extra
| privacy you gain from blocking that is really worth breaking
| half the web. Fingerprinting is not too hard even without JS.
| delusional wrote:
| His stance is pretty simple. The JS on most pages is
| proprietary, and he doesn't like proprietary software.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Blocking most JavaScript is fine, it mostly just breaks the
| silly pointless over-designed sites anyway. Just like
| everything else, most of the internet is garbage; blocking
| over-designed JavaScript sites isn't a perfect filter but it
| is an ok first heuristic.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| > Does he have a strong stance of JS in the browser?
|
| Lets see what he says on the subject.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
| IshKebab wrote:
| Ok so his issue is even more obtuse - he doesn't care about
| fingerprinting; he cares that not all JS code is GPL.
| StillBored wrote:
| I would re-frame "is it really worth breaking half the web"
| as those sites are not compliant to begin with. Nothing in
| the web standards stack mandates javascript, its an optional
| feature! Web developers of yore understood that a fundamental
| property of a properly written web site was to degrade
| gracefully if javascript wasn't available, but the groupthink
| of the past decade has chosen weaponized incompetence over
| doing their jobs and in the process has not only thrown a
| load of noncompliant insecure garbage out there, but broken a
| load of accessibility standards, and other things in the
| process.
| binaryturtle wrote:
| A browser basically is like a really dumb trojan, pulling a
| whole herd of wooden horses into the city.
| codedokode wrote:
| The problem is not JS, the problem is useless techonolgies like
| WebRTC or WebGL that can run without permission and that, I
| think, are used in 99% cases for figerprinting. And people who
| designed them and did nothing to prevent fingerprinting.
| binoct wrote:
| Neither WebRTC or WebGL are remotely 'useless'. Very fair
| though to say that you would prefer to have them disabled
| and/or whitelisted for certain sites.
| beeflet wrote:
| WebGL and WebRTC are hardly useless, but they allow you to
| collect way too much fingerprinting data based on the way
| they've been designed.
| gruez wrote:
| >The core of the problem is that we've made this behavior of
| "run javascript that pulls more javascript and then run that
| too" the default. Stallman was right, as always.
|
| It really isn't, because there's plenty of fingerprinting
| scripts that run on the same domain, especially fingerprinters
| from security providers like cloudflare or akamai.
| boxedemp wrote:
| The older I get the more I see that RMS was right about so many
| things.
|
| When I was young I used to think of him as that eccentric
| pedantic mit guy but now I see him as a true warrior for
| freedom.
| daft_pink wrote:
| I'm curious if there is a product like cloudflare's remote
| browser isolation that obfuscates it in that way.
| tetha wrote:
| It reminds me of a game we played with students of data
| classification algorithms like ID3: How many yes/no questions do
| we need to uniquely identify everyone in this room?
|
| With like 12 students, that's 4 bits, and it often ends up with
| 2-3 questions. It starts off with the obvious ones -
| man/woman/diverse, but then a realization comes in: An answer
| usually contains more information than just that one bit. If you
| have long hair, you're most likely a woman and/or a metalhead for
| example. That part will get shaken out later on.
|
| And those thoughts make these browser fingerprinting techniques
| all the more scary: They contain a lot of information and that
| quickly cuts the possible amount of people down. Like, I'm a
| Linux Firefox user with a screen on the left. I wouldn't be
| suprised if that put me in a 5-6 digit bucket of people already.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| >An answer usually contains more information than just that one
| bit.
|
| Isn't the point to ask yes or no questions?
| tetha wrote:
| Yes, but multiple yes or no questions in combination can
| easily yield more information than they should in a real
| dataset. That's the real educational point.
| gweinberg wrote:
| You seem to be confused about the difference between "less"
| and "more". In general a yes-no question gives less than 1
| bit of information if yes and no are not equally likely.
| There is no way it can be expected to give more.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > There is no way it can be expected to give more.
|
| It is indeed not possible for it to give more, because it
| only has a single bit answer, which by the pigeonhole
| principle can't give you more than one bit.
|
| The best yes/no questions are the ones which are
| independent of each other and bisect the group evenly.
| "Are you female" is typically good because it will be
| approximately half the population. Then you want
| independent questions that bisect the population again,
| like "does your first name have more than the median
| number of letters" which should be mostly independent of
| the first question. Another good one is conditional
| questions like "are you taller than the median for your
| sex" since a pure height question wouldn't be independent
| of sex but that one is.
|
| Whereas bad questions would be ones with highly
| disproportionate responses, like "do you have pink hair
| with black and green highlights" which might be true for
| someone somewhere but is going to have >99% of people
| answering no, or "were you born on the planet Mercury"
| which will be 100% no and provide zero bits of
| information.
| emil-lp wrote:
| It's still a yes/no question, it's just that the question is
| "do you have long hair".
|
| The goal of these decision trees is to have as few questions
| that divide the group in two balanced halves (and also
| recursively).
|
| If you imagine a binary tree with questions in each internal
| node, and in each leaf there is a person. You want the height
| of the tree to be minimized.
| zie wrote:
| Yes, but you can make assumptions based on what you know
| about humans generally. Like their example that if you ask if
| you have long hair. If you answer yes the likelihood is you
| are probably female.
|
| You can think of all sorts of questions and answers like
| this, and when you combine with the assumptions and answers
| from previous answers you can make even more assumptions.
| They won't always be correct, but you don't have to be
| "perfect", depending on your use-case. For example for
| advertising purposes assumptions(even if incorrect) can still
| go a long way.
|
| There is a reason Target got sooo good at identifying
| pregnant women[0] before the women knew they were pregnant
| that they creeped out women, and had to pull back what they
| did with that information. This was like a decade or more
| ago. It's only gotten more accurate since then.
|
| 0: one example from 2012:
| https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-
| high-...
| codedokode wrote:
| > Target got sooo good at identifying pregnant women
|
| That's why I pay with cash and do not have a loyalty card
| (other customers often offer theirs at cash register
| anyway). And of course I don't even go to Target.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| I don't know if Target specifically use all of these, but
| I would bet they have data based on at least some of
| facial/gait/demographic recognition, wi-fi/Bluetooth
| beaconing, vehicle registrations, time and location
| tracking, statistical analysis of your purchases and
| clustering of people you have made purchases next to
| (e.g. you bought something at same time and till as your
| mother more then once). I'm sure they have other methods
| too. They can also combine datasets from brokers that do
| have a face:name link (say you used a card at another
| store that captured it and sold the data) and resolve you
| within their own data that way.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-
| a-t...
|
| https://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/machinelearningtim
| e...
| georgefrowny wrote:
| > An answer usually contains more information than just that
| one bit.
|
| That means there is less information in the question "do they
| have long hair?", not more. Asking "long hair?" and then
| "woman?" is probably, in most groups, roughly the same as just
| the first or second question alone. So the second question
| added much less than one bit of information because the answer
| is probably "yes". "Long hair" and then "metalhead" is the
| same, except that the answer to the second question is probably
| "no".
|
| Yes/no questions on average contain the most information each
| when they partition the remaining possibilities 50:50. Then
| each answer gives you exactly one more bit. The closet you get
| to either a 100:0 or 0:100 yes:no split, the smaller the
| fraction of a bit you encode in the answer.
|
| "Metalhead?" usually gives you lots of bits of information
| (probably 4 in an "average" group of 16 containing at least one
| metalhead) if the answer is "yes", but on average that's
| outweighed by the very high chance that the answer will be
| "no". If there are no metalheads or only metalheads, it gives
| you zero information.
| tetha wrote:
| Ah, I flipped it in my head. That happens after 10 years.
|
| In this case, it was often an interesting exercise in bias as
| well. "Woman?" would usually single out 1-2 persons out of
| the 15, so it was a terrible question. It was CompSci after
| all. "Long hair?", lumping women and metal heads into one
| group would often split it into half and half. That was much
| better, and then spurred creative thoughts like travel
| distance, or bus stations.
| btilly wrote:
| I don't mind advertisers knowing more about me. If they can
| display ads that are relevant to me, this is a better experience
| on both sides.
|
| Unfortunately there is no way to tell advertisers, "No, I'm not
| interested in your product. I never will be. Don't waste your
| money."
|
| The top offender is Hims. No, I don't have hair loss. I don't
| want hair loss supplements. I also don't have ED, and I object
| strongly to ads for that showing up unexpectedly when I'm showing
| a YouTube video to someone else.
|
| The second top offender is whoever it is (they keep changing
| their name) who thinks that I need some kind of Christian
| motivational course to get control of "the P-word". (Their
| phrase, not mine.) No, I don't have a problem with pornography. I
| am very rarely interested in it. And when it comes up every few
| months, I don't feel any guilt about it afterwards. Furthermore
| I'm an atheist. A Christian motivational course isn't going to
| work well for me regardless.
|
| Yes, Google does offer a report function, and a block function,
| for ads. The report function seems to have gotten rid of the
| unwanted ED ads. The block really doesn't work when the ads are
| all very similar AI slop that is rotated frequently. Block this
| ad, and then next unwanted ad from the same source will be coming
| along soon enough. (The reason why I particularly dislike Hims is
| that they are more aggressively rotating their ads.)
| blfr wrote:
| If you don't mind them knowing but resent the ads, you can just
| block the ads. You can do dns ad blocking[1], in-browser
| plugins/extensions[2], finally, patch the apps[3]. Or deploy
| all of them.
|
| [1] https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-
| tls#...
|
| [2] https://ublockorigin.com/
|
| [3] https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.google.android.youtube
| btilly wrote:
| Perhaps you missed that I am willing to deal with ads in
| general? I am perfectly willing to put up with the annoyance,
| and like knowing that I am bringing money to the channel that
| I'm watching. I only want specific advertisers turned off.
|
| A general "show me no ads" solution is not my preference.
| charlie-83 wrote:
| Relevant/personalised ads doesn't mean ads that benefit you.
| It's means ads that are better able to extract money from you.
|
| It means that, when you need a new dishwasher, you will never
| see the actual best dishwasher for you, only dishwashers that
| are a bit more expensive than you actually need but you will
| end up buying one of them anyways.
|
| It means that you are more likely to see products you would
| impulse buy just after you get your paycheck. Or slightly
| inflated prices on things you usually buy.
|
| It means ads designed to take advantage of addictions to sugar,
| alcohol, gambling etc
|
| Finding stuff you actually want to buy has never been easier,
| you can find hundreds of reviews and comparisons instantly.
| People who opt into personalised ads don't end up being more
| savvy online shoppers, they just end up buying more junk.
| btilly wrote:
| My preferences are based on my understanding of myself.
|
| I do not have those problem addictions. Of course I am going
| to comparison shop for any large purchases. I am good enough
| about controlling spending that excess junk isn't one of my
| problems.
|
| But what I do have a problem with is coming up with creative
| ideas for people in my life. So, for example, I would have
| never thought to look for
| https://www.zazzle.com/cup_equation_love-168099175298227864.
| But I'm very glad that someone out there knew enough about me
| to guess that this might be an item that I'd like. And my
| wife liked the cup a whole lot.
|
| Does this happen often? No. But I'm perfectly happy to pay a
| premium for a product when an advertiser gets it right.
| charlie-83 wrote:
| There are always situations where an advert is useful and
| we remember those. However, when an advert causes you to
| spend more than you would, you have no idea it has
| happened.
|
| Maybe you truly are above the influence of advertising.
| However, almost no one believes that they are affected by
| advertising yet clearly almost all of those people are
| wrong.
|
| I find it safer to assume I am part of the vast majority of
| people who would be influenced by personalised advertising.
| Given that online advertising is basically the biggest
| business in the world, I assume that it would find a way to
| get money from me.
| canyp wrote:
| That is a loser's proposition. Targeted advertising should be
| objected to on the grounds that surveillance and manipulation
| are unethical, it doesn't matter how useful it may or may not
| be in your personal experience. Them suddenly being more useful
| wouldn't make them any more ethical.
| drnick1 wrote:
| Firefox w/ the Arkenfox user.js is probably as good as it gets in
| terms of privacy. By default, this config burns cookies on exit,
| standardizes the time zone to UTC, spoofs the canvas fingerprint,
| and does other helpful things. Basically, it makes Firefox expose
| the same information as the Tor browser.
|
| In addition, I block most known advertizing/tracking domains at
| the DNS level (I run my own server, and use Hagezi's blacklists).
|
| Finally, another suggestion would be to block all third party
| content by default using uBlock Origin and/or uMatrix. This will
| break a lot of websites, but automatically rules out most forms
| of tracking through things such as fonts hosted by Google, Adobe
| and others. I manually whitelist required third party domains
| (CDNs) for websites I frequently visit.
| alcide wrote:
| Orion Browser (Kagi Product) prevents fingerprinters from
| running by default.
|
| https://help.kagi.com/orion/privacy-and-security/preventing-...
| codedokode wrote:
| How do they reliably detect fingerprinting? Did they solve
| the Halting Problem? Sounds fishy.
| gruez wrote:
| >The only efficient protection against fingerprinting is
| what Orion is doing -- preventing any fingerprinter from
| running in the first place. Orion is the only browser on
| the market that comes with full first-party and third-party
| ad and tracking script blocking, built-in by default,
| making sure invasive fingerprinters never run on the page.
|
| sounds like they block "known" fingerprinting scripts and
| call it a day.
| 0xy wrote:
| This makes you inherently trackable, ironically. No trace
| is a massive trackable attribute, since almost nobody is
| untraceable.
| RamRodification wrote:
| Hey look it's that invisible guy again!
| jorvi wrote:
| > Orion is the only browser on the market that comes with
| full first-party and third-party ad and tracking script
| blocking
|
| I love Kagi, but that is a laughable statement. Brave has
| been offering ad and fingerprint blocking for years now.
| The reason why they don't have full first party blocking
| ("aggressive" mode blocking) on by default is because it
| tends to break things.
| ashman5 wrote:
| Orion browser is also capable of running uBlock Origin (not
| Lite) on iOS.
| codedokode wrote:
| Does it hide GPU name that is exposed via WebGL/WebGPU? Does it
| hide internal IP address, available via WebRTC?
|
| > block all third party content
|
| It's not going to work, because the fingerprinting script can
| be (and is often served) from first-party domain.
|
| Also imagine if browser didn't provide drawing API for canvas
| (if you would have to ship your own wasm rendering library).
| Canvas would become useless for fingerprinting and its usage
| would drop manyfold. And the browser would have less code and
| smaller attack surface.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > Does it hide GPU name that is exposed via WebGL/WebGPU?
| Does it hide internal IP address, available via WebRTC?
|
| My GPU is reported as simply "Mozilla" by
| https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/.
|
| The number of cores is also set to 4 for everyone using this
| config and/or Tor.
|
| > It's not going to work, because the fingerprinting script
| can be (and is often served) from first-party domain.
|
| This may be true, but allowed third party content makes it
| trivially easy for Google and others to follow people around
| the Internet through fonts delivery systems among others.
| tempest_ wrote:
| I had forgotten I was running Ublock origin / Privacy
| Badger / Ghostry so I was a bit confused with the results
| from that site.
|
| I think it is Ghostry that is faking the responses but I
| still have a pretty unique fingerprint according to
| https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/kcarter?aat=1
| dminuoso wrote:
| If I infiltrate someone else's computer, secretly run code in
| order to to exfiltrate data I risk prison time because
| objectively it seems to satisfy criminal laws over where I
| live.
|
| How do prosecutors in any modern country/state not charge
| this behavior when done by a website owner?
| gruez wrote:
| The difference is that there's implied consent to run
| arbitrary (albeit sandboxed) code when you visit a website.
| Moreover it's not the website causing the code to be
| executed, it's your browser. Otherwise if the bar is "code
| is being run but the user doesn't know about it", it would
| lead to either any type of web pages with javascript being
| illegal (or maybe without javascript, given that CSS turing
| complete), or a cookie banner type situation where site
| asks for consent and everyone just blindly accepts.
| mh- wrote:
| _> if the bar is "code is being run but the user doesn't
| know about it",_
|
| .. would lead to all modern electronics being illegal,
| not just web pages with javascript.
| bandrami wrote:
| > any type of web pages with javascript being illegal
|
| Inshallah
| kachapopopow wrote:
| All javascript based anti-fingerprinting is detectable and is
| also a major source of uniqueness!
| vorticalbox wrote:
| Sure but if you are always unique for every website then you
| can't be tracked overtime.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| They meant a signal of uniqueness for your setup that could
| still assist with tracking, not being unique for every
| site.
| 0xy wrote:
| As someone who utilizes these tools for anti-fraud purposes,
| Firefox is just as trackable if not more trackable than Chrome
| (especially because you stand out by using a niche browser in
| the first place).
|
| Firefox exposes a massive amount of identifiable information
| via canvas, audio device and feature detection methods. There's
| also active methods to detect private windows, use of the
| developer console and more.
| vpShane wrote:
| Of course. There's data where there isn't data.
|
| -make client load something
|
| -client doesn't load it
|
| -add.fingerprint.point(client,'doesnltloadthings',1)
|
| -detect if client does something only a certain browser does
|
| -client does it
|
| -add.fingerprint.point(client,'doesthisbrowsderthing',1)
|
| -window was resized/moved, send a websocket snitch to the
| backend
|
| - keep a consistent web socket open, or fetch a backend-api
| call for updates on X events - more calls are made, means
| user is probably scrolling, inject more things/different
| things.
|
| I see some js obfuscators out there where I look at the js
| file and it's all mumbo jumbo.
|
| It is indeed a privacy nightmare, where whatever we do feeds
| the algorithms to aide in making other people do things.
|
| But it's also used in network security, organizations etc.
| Staff/employees will use the system a certain way, if
| something enters it without the behaviors, it's detectable. I
| assume that's what you mean in anti-fraud.
|
| Sad part is we don't know what the data is ever used for, and
| it's often bought and sold and the cycle repeats.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" This will break a lot of websites, but automatically rules
| out most forms of tracking..."_
|
| Whether one breaks a lot of websites or not depends on the type
| of user one is. People who regularly use the Google ecosystem,
| Amazon and Social Media etc. cannot afford to break sites for
| obvious reasons, they too are those that websites are most
| interested in tracking and fingerprinting.
|
| Those who use the web in the way advertisers and Big Tech
| intend users to use it are the most vulnerable, they're the
| ones who most need protection.
|
| I break websites regularly but it doesn't worry me, I browse
| with the premise that there are more websites on the internet
| than I'll ever be able to visit and if I break sites or are
| blocked by paywalls then there are usually alternatives and
| workarounds.
|
| But then I'm not a typical user, I block ads, I usually browse
| with JS off, kill cookies, use block lists, use multiple
| browsers (there are six on this deGoogled, rooted phone),
| browse from multiple machines--Windows, Linux and use multiple
| ISPs. Also, I've no Social media or Google accounts and rarely
| ever purchase stuff online. Internet access is via dynamic IP
| addresses and routers are rebooted often. There's more but you
| get the picture.
|
| I assume browsing sans JS makes me a first-class target for
| fingerprinting and that websites know about me but it doesn't
| matter. Whatever I'm doing seems to work, over the years I've
| had very little trouble doing everything on the web that I want
| to do. Clearly I'm of little interest to advertisers and I
| never see ads let alone targeted ones. I used to use uBlock
| Origin but I don't bother now as browsing sans JS is just so
| effective at blocking ads.
|
| I'm lucky in the fact that I use no service that would benefit
| from fingerprinting me. Whilst my web browsing is atypical of
| most users I reckon many could benefit by being more proactive
| --using multiple machines, browsers, ISPs etc.--to disrupt the
| outflow of personal data. For example, this is being written on
| a rooted Android using Privacy Browser from F-Droid sans JS and
| with block lists. If I really need to go to a site where JS is
| required, I can simply hit a toggle and turn on JS or
| alternatively use another browser.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| unfamiliar with the Arkenfox user.js but are any of these
| things that are beyond what firefox enables out of the box if
| you turn on privacy.resistFingerprinting ? Because what you
| describe seems to be all stuff it does just by flipping flag.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| There's no point unless a critical mass of people use these
| tools. You will be the only one on your IP address using this
| configuration of masked fingerprinting, which is itself a
| fingerprint.
|
| That's also why it's indeed useful when using Tor, because
| you're not identified by your base IP.
|
| Unless we make this part of the culture, you have basically 0
| recourse to browser fingerprinting except using Tor. Which can
| itself still be a useful fingerprint depending on the context.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| There is also server side fingerprinting like JA4+ and others.
| Also, if you somehow evade fingeprinting, you have to prepare
| yourself to solve some very slow Google and Cloudflare
| captchas.
| udev4096 wrote:
| JavaScript disabling helps a lot, regardless of what author says.
| It disables most of the tracking attempts, improves security and
| most of all pages load faster and hardly break if you're just
| browsing anyway.
|
| The whole article never mentions the gold standard of anti-
| fingerprinting, Tor Browser. It just shows how shallow the
| article is when it mentions Mullvad Browser, a fork of TBB,
| instead of TBB itself! There's also no mention of using an upto-
| date DNS block list to thwart fingerprinting attempts even more
| msm_ wrote:
| Yeah, I don't get it. Tor browser alone, with no additional
| configuration and basic hygiene, is enough to stop any
| fingerprinting and tracking. The only problem is that it's
| _too_ private, and tor traffic is often associated with crime,
| so it 's sometimes blocked, notably by cloudflare.
|
| I don't use it for daily browsing, but when I want to search
| for something I don't want associated with me (for example,
| health concerns) I just use tor browser and don't worry about
| tracking.
| armadyl wrote:
| The Tor Browser won't effectively stop fingerprinting, if
| anything it makes you more unique due to the low amount of
| people worldwide using it, and then you add points of data by
| using different DNS providers, extensions etc.
|
| The Tor Browser as a privacy measure is likely no better than
| a normal browser with uBlock if you're also using it like a
| "normal" browser, signing into the same accounts you always
| use etc. My opinion obviously but I dislike people
| recommending the Tor Browser as a lot of it's primary
| benefits are lost if you're just using it as a daily driver
| browser.
|
| I always point people to https://fingerprint.com/ to see if
| their browser can defeat it. Most of the time you can't
| without clearing cookies, changing device resolution, change
| VPN location etc. something the average person can't/won't
| do. Even JS aside there are a ton of different ways to track
| people based off even just getting server side data when a
| site's stylesheet is fetched.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| We're working on a comprehensive solution here (and could use
| your help), the Ethical Computing Initiative.
|
| https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/
| gweinberg wrote:
| For a fingerprint to be useful it must not only be unique but
| also persistent. If I have a process that randomly installs and
| deletes wacky fonts, I'm unique at any given time, but the me of
| today can't be linked to the me of tomorrow, right?
| internetter wrote:
| Point still taken, however you can only really check if a given
| font is installed, not obtain a _list_ of all fonts. Thus,
| installing a wacky font is pointless as the fingerprinter won't
| bother to check that particular font. There is queryLocalFonts
| on chrome but this requires a permission popup.
| gruez wrote:
| >If I have a process that randomly installs and deletes wacky
| fonts, I'm unique at any given time, but the me of today can't
| be linked to the me of tomorrow, right?
|
| See: https://xkcd.com/1105/
|
| Services with a large enough fingerprinting database can filter
| out implausible values and flag you as faking your fingerprint,
| which is itself fingerprintable.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| But they still wouldn't be able to confidently connect his
| different fingerprints to the same individual, just that he
| is one of a group of individuals who fake their fingerprints.
| gruez wrote:
| It would depend on what your existing fingerprint is. If
| you're using some sort of rare browser/OS/hardware
| combination (eg. pale moon/gentoo linux/IBM thinkpad) it
| might be worth spoofing, but if your configuration is
| relatively "normie" (eg. firefox/windows/relatively recent
| intel or amd cpu/igpu)you're probably making yourself stick
| out more by faking your fingerprint.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| The issue is that, especially on desktop, I doubt there
| are many fingerprints that more than 100 people have,
| given everything that they test. I would even suspect
| that most common desktop fingerprints are classified as
| bots.
| poorman wrote:
| It's likely that yes, you will end up with an alias that links
| you because of a cookie somewhere, or a finger print of the
| elliptic curve when do do a SSL handshake, or any number of
| other ways.
|
| The ironic thing is that because of GDPR and CCPA, ad tech
| companies got really good at "anonymizing" your data. So even
| if you were to somehow not have an alias linking your various
| anonymous profiles, you will still end up quickly bucketed into
| a persona (and multiple audiences) that resemble you quite
| well. And it's not multiple days of data we're talking about
| (although it could be), it's minutes and in the case of
| contextual multi-armed bandits, your persona is likely updates
| "within" a single page load and you are targeted in ~5ms within
| the request/response lifecycle of that page load.
|
| The good news is that most data platforms don't keep data
| around for more than 90 days because then they are
| automatically compliant with "right to be forgotten" without
| having to service requests for removal of personal data.
| lipbetfox wrote:
| I still haven't found a method that can fingerprint simple
| Firefox containers. I use automatic temporary containers as a
| rule, and rules for specific sites where I want to keep
| persistent sessions.
|
| I don't understand how temporary containers are still not a
| built-in Firefox feature, it seems like such a no-brainer
| solution for privacy.
| rob_c wrote:
| How to scream I'm behaving badly online...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Isn't the semi-recent per-site cookie jar most of this
| functionality?
| boxedemp wrote:
| Open question,
|
| If you're on a VPN and using Firefox containers, is the only
| way to identify me to look at my mouse movement and correlate
| it?
| baalimago wrote:
| On the pros of fingerprinting: it's practically the only
| consistent tool to prevent malicious use in certain usecases,
| such as app hosting and similar bot protection.
|
| Email validation doesn't work. Ip blocking doesn't work. Captcha?
| Kind of. Fingerprinting? Very efficient.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Sandboxing in containers and manually exempting specific security
| tokens is arguably one of the better steps we can take in the
| immediate term, as are random agent strings and returning fake
| data for common prompts. Of course that only works in the
| immediate, because this, like advertising in general, is an arms
| race at the moment.
|
| This feels like a regulatory question, not a technical one. We've
| repeatedly proven that with math and code alone, we can
| fingerprint and identify almost every unique person on the
| planet, given enough data points. The long-term solution seems
| like it should be severe consequences for data breaches (as in,
| corporation-destroying penalties for disclosure of PII, including
| fingerprint data) such that everyone only collects the data they
| need to provide the service in question and not a single bit
| more, deleting it as soon as it's no longer necessary. Right now
| there's no consequence if Google or Meta disclose huge swaths of
| user data, and thus no disincentive to collecting as much as they
| possibly can.
|
| Punish the leaking of data, and suddenly you've raised it's cost
| to the point that casual players will nope out entirely. From
| there, it's the eternal back and forth of governments waffling
| between business and electorate interests.
| gruez wrote:
| >We've repeatedly proven that with math and code alone, we can
| fingerprint and identify almost every unique person on the
| planet, given enough data points.
|
| I'm very skeptical of this claim, especially in practice.
| Contrary to what many fingerprinting sites claim ("you're
| unique of everyone we fingerprinted!!"), browser fingerprinting
| can't possibly uniquely identify someone. Smartphones are
| pretty locked down and there's very few customization options
| that allow for fingerprinting. In the US Apple has around 50%
| market share in the US, and there are 30 iPhones models that
| are still in support. That means if you're an iPhone user in a
| city of 1 million, there are, on average, approximately 16.6k
| (500k / 30) other people with the same exact model of iPhone
| (and therefore fingerprint) as you. As long as you don't do
| anything to stick out (eg. living in the US but setting Denmark
| as your locale), you'll be reasonably anonymous.
| alkonaut wrote:
| There is no good technical solution here. But the damage could be
| limited if browsers at least limited entropy somewhat. Stuff like
| reading back canvas contents should need user approval.
|
| Just make sure it's sufficiently illegal to keep this info. Find
| and make big visible examples of fining companies that trade in
| this info. If a company sells a product that fetches ads based on
| an "identifier" their little js snippet computed then just pay
| them a visit. Fine both them and their customers to the max
| extent of the gdpr (or equivalent).
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Don't confuse privacy with anonymity. One is a right in the US,
| the other is not.
| Rygian wrote:
| Not trying to be sarcastic; I may be unaware of some relevant
| legal framework for the US, could you please elaborate which
| one is a right and how is it enshrined and enforced?
| dmacedo wrote:
| Not American here, but I'm aware of both privacy in mixed
| forms (privacy act 1974, HIPAA, COPPA, and CCPA in
| California); as well as anonimity in First Amendment et al
| since there's case law (IANAL) demonstrating the requirement
| of anonimity to avoid persecution of free speech.
|
| All of these have limitations and exceptions in a complex
| legal system. But to issue a blanket statement like the
| comment above is no really correct - just trying to make a
| point, I guess
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Also not a lawyer but anonymity case law is a mixed bag to
| best, and more practically speaking very narrowly targeted
| compared to privacy.
| hinkley wrote:
| The only way to have privacy in a semi public location, like
| the Internet, is anonymity.
|
| Ask any celebrity how much privacy they have. They can't even
| buy Starbucks without people commenting on how fat their comfy
| clothes make them look. Because they have no anonymity.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Since almost every web browser in the world now supports
| JavaScript, turning it off as a measure to protect privacy is
| like going to the shopping mall wearing a ski mask._
|
| I'm going to steal this nice analogy, for when I try to explain
| this point and some related points.
| beders wrote:
| when PayPal tells you that they already know you and don't
| require you to log in: that's fingerprint.com behind the scenes.
|
| There are pros/cons.
|
| It should be obvious by now that using any _free_ service of
| scale is being paid for by your interactions which are made more
| valuable through fingerprinting.
|
| Trying to circumvent that just makes it more expensive for the
| rest of us.
| Zarathustra30 wrote:
| Paypal does what? I'm sometimes nervous I only need 2 factors
| of authentication. 0FA seems dangerous for financial anything.
| ghxst wrote:
| Browser data points can make it easy to identify a browser or in
| some cases even a specific machine, but that doesn't necessarily
| equate to identifying a user. What frustrates me is that it takes
| a service I trusted with my personal data to be the one that
| attaches an identifier to those metrics. The best practice for
| privacy is to always keep profiles and identities separated,
| rotate P.O. boxes, email addresses, phone numbers, and payment
| methods so that when someone identifies your browser or device,
| the accuracy of linking it to you stays low. Of course, this
| approach comes with its own problems...
| bolangi wrote:
| The article is missing links to one of the first fingerprint
| diagnostic tools, https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ , formerly
| called something like panopticon.net.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| or don't trust the EFF!
| skaul wrote:
| Self-plug but if anyone is interested in learning more about how
| browser fingerprinting works and the different protections
| browser makers deploy against it, I wrote a longer post about
| this a few months ago:
| https://pitg.network/news/techdive/2025/08/15/browser-finger...
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| its consistent cross site, so you get all the same privacy
| problems as with 3rd party cookies
| zkmon wrote:
| I'm sure it's a privacy issue. But how does this browser
| fingerprinting harm the user? Maybe it can work like a session
| cookie used for correlating across different requests from the
| same user. What's the damage here?
| aragonite wrote:
| Some time ago I noticed that in Chrome, every time you click
| "Never translate $language", $language quietly gets added to the
| Accept-Language header that Chrome sends to every website!
|
| My header ended up looking like a permuted version of this:
| en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,de;q=0.7,ja;q=0.6
|
| I never manually configured any of those extra languages in the
| browser settings. All I had done was tell Chrome not to translate
| a few pages on some foreign news sites. Chrome then turned those
| one-off choices into persistent signals attached to every
| request.
|
| I'd be surprised if anyone in my vicinity share my exact
| combination of languages in that exact order, so this seems like
| a pretty strong fingerprinting vector.
|
| There was even a proposal to reduce this surface area, but it
| wasn't adopted:
|
| https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/reduce-accept-lang...
| hoofedear wrote:
| Is Chrome trying to assume that, since you don't want it to
| translate those pages/languages, that you can read them/want
| them in your header? Interesting
| fsflover wrote:
| Using Chrome and caring about privacy? I thought, after Google
| killed uBlock Origin, it had become beyond clear these two
| things were incompatible,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41905368
| esseph wrote:
| uBlock origin just got replaced with uBlock lite for most
| people
| fsflover wrote:
| Which, by design, doesn't protect you from actual spying,
| https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-
| as...
| anthk wrote:
| There's a way to enforce loading UBo in Chromium but you
| need to download the extension by hand (git clone it from
| GitHub) and load it in "developer mode" in the extension
| settings. Also, you need to enable some legacy options
| related to extensions in about:flags.
| scrollop wrote:
| PSA Don't use chrome.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Definitely a good STEP1, but it's not like Firefox and Safari
| are finger printing secure.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Firefox does pretty damn well though, especially with
| privacy.resistFingerprinting set to true
| fsflover wrote:
| Tor Browser (based on Firefox) is.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| what about duck duck go? We need a simple chart: 1. What
| browsers are good at resisting finger printing 2. tell for
| each browser, does it work on android ad ios and apple and
| windows and linux 3. what setting are needed to achieve
| this
|
| for bonus points, is there no way to strip all headers on
| chrome on control it better?
| datavirtue wrote:
| I only use it when I want to be tracked.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Hmmm...YouTube has been getting confused about the language and
| displaying random languages for the closed captions on videos.
| This was happening to me across smart TVs but I access YouTube
| randomly from various devices and browsers...but mostly Chrome
| when using a browser.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > There was even a proposal to reduce this surface area, but it
| wasn't adopted:
|
| >> Instead of sending a full list of the users' preferred
| languages from browsers and letting sites figure out which
| language to use, we propose a language negotiation process in
| the browser, which means in addition to the Content-Language
| header, the site also needs to respond with a header indicating
| all languages it supports
|
| Who thought that made sense? Show me the website that (1) is
| available in multiple languages, and also (2) can't display a
| list of languages _to the user_ for manual selection.
| kkfx wrote:
| Has anyone ever thought that RSS doesn't have a fingerprint?
|
| Because the sites that still offer feeds, at least those for
| which a feed makes sense, well, you can read them comfortably via
| RSS.
| baq wrote:
| The real problem: if you can't be identified, the system assumes
| you're a bot, untrustworthy, or both and instead of reading
| content you get to select squares with buses and traffic lights
| ad infinitum.
| pphysch wrote:
| Yes, and the conspicuous lack of signal is itself a signal.
|
| "Get me all the individuals in this geo area that have atypical
| communication patterns..."
| Terr_ wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1105/
| rncode wrote:
| you're all running chrome signed into google with 47 extensions
| and complaining about privacy. the call is coming from inside the
| house
| nobody42 wrote:
| You could test with this:
| https://github.com/abrahamjuliot/creepjs Does it store the data?
| Unknown.
|
| The best browser for protection is https://mullvad.net/en/browser
| because it makes the connection uniform, to better blend in.
| thetyster wrote:
| > best
|
| I guess that really depends on how you classify "best"
|
| Tor is pretty good for protection. Then there's always i2P as
| well...
|
| Saying one browser can protect the best is pretty hard to
| prove.
| nobody42 wrote:
| Best among existing. Anti-fingerprinting field is still in
| it's early stages.
|
| I wouldn't say Tor Browser is the best because it requires
| custom configuration to be usable conveniently, which will
| make the connection non-uniform (and the user will stand
| out).
|
| >Tor is pretty good for protection. Then there's always i2P
| as well...
|
| Tor and i2P does nothing for (anti)fingerprinting - the
| program which render the web pages does.
|
| >Saying one browser can protect the best is pretty hard to
| prove.
|
| Not a proof but things to consider: https://privacytests.org/
| sfink wrote:
| I'd like a "Firefox + uBlock Origin" column on that page.
| (But then you'd have to consider filter lists enabled...)
| WorldPeas wrote:
| seeing projects like https://github.com/jonasstrehle/supercookie
| kind of fill me with a dread about just how many holes would need
| to be plugged in the web for "privacy" to be assured, and how
| that would degrade my experience as an end user
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| When an individual stalks a person without their consent, it is
| considered unlawful. Why is it ok for websites to do this?
|
| Perhaps what is missing is a criminal law that forbids deliberate
| non-consensual tracking of a person's activity. Even in public.
|
| Recording someone as you happen to be recording something in
| public (including CCTV) is not deliberate or targeted towards an
| individual. But even in public, if someone followed you around
| tracking what you're doing (even without recording you), that
| shouldn't be lawful. Public figures and law enforcement activity
| based on probable cause being the exceptions.
|
| Can anyone think of any reasonable counter-arguments to this?
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