[HN Gopher] The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
___________________________________________________________________
The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
Author : ingve
Score : 704 points
Date : 2025-11-22 17:08 UTC (1 days 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.
| immibis wrote:
| If Steam only had one input field for the price tag, then
| the publishers would only decide one price.
| 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...
| pseudalopex wrote:
| And people prefer unlimited subscriptions.
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| I wasn't aware of Blendle, but I'm not surprised that it
| failed.
|
| Advertising is ubiquitous on the web. Integrating it into
| web sites is simple, it works well for generating revenue
| at scale, and users have been conditioned from every
| other media industry to accessing content for "free".
| There is practically no friction for users, save for the
| degraded user experience, which most people have learned
| to live with or ignore.
|
| So right off the bat, anyone trying to deploy alternative
| business models is going against the current of a
| trillion-dollar industry, and well established consumer
| expectations.
|
| > readers and publishers both hate it.
|
| Why do you think that is? Is it because the micropayment
| model is inherently bad, or because implementing it is
| difficult for website owners, it is annoying to use for
| users, and ultimately brings little revenue?
|
| What if implementing it were as easy and convenient as
| advertising is today? What if users had an easy and
| convenient way to link their payment method into their
| browser, and from then on it required no maintenance?
| What if they understood that the web is not "free", but
| someone on the other end should be paid for their work if
| they find it valuable? What if this model actually
| generated significant revenue for publishers? What if all
| this was simply the way the web operated from the start?
|
| Clearly this model hinges on a bunch of hypotheticals,
| but hopefully you get the point. There's nothing
| fundamentally wrong about users paying for consuming
| content. This is the way business transactions work in
| most respectable industries. You want something, you pay
| for it directly. You don't ask a third party to step in
| between you and the seller, to show you manipulative
| content that directly benefits them and their associates,
| while indirectly paying for the thing you actually want
| to buy. The fact we've accepted this corrupt business
| model as normal in many facets of life is absolutely
| insane. Never mind the fact that it's being used to
| manipulate us into thinking and acting in ways which
| corrupt democratic processes and cause sociopolitical
| instability, or that it's abusing our right to privacy
| and exploiting our data. To hell with all of that.
| 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.
| EbNar wrote:
| Nope, they don't "put ads on the site". That's not how it
| works.
| 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.
| stackghost wrote:
| I blog for my own satisfaction, and my blog has no ads on
| it, and I don't charge visitors. I'm happy to have a few
| dozen readers.
|
| That's what people are bemoaning the loss of: the before
| times, when people did interesting stuff without regard
| for whether it could be monetized or not.
| pr3dr49 wrote:
| Charge the provider per view. Charge the sender of that spam
| email per message delivered. The new internet. Would this
| work?
| 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.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Yep, exactly. So ideally, we'd have some technology that
| would be able to achieve those goals without needing all
| the info that is gathered nowadays. Though that is pretty
| unpopular here too.
| 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.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Ideal for what problem? Certainly not for reducing Google's
| data collection and improving privacy. It would only work
| with tons of small payment providers, but then you are back
| at square 1 that users need to subscribe with tons of
| services for just pennies.
| 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?
| ykonstant wrote:
| Best I can do is tree fiddy. Perhaps a little ragebait
| could give it that extra oomph it needs.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| You mean tree fiddy _per month_ , right?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| About as valuable, as many content creators' work. But it
| all hinges on engagement, so consider this my part in
| helping you to the next million.
| 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.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| In that world, a _Culture_ -esque thing, then absolutely
| so.
| 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.)
| jwr wrote:
| Anything that can provide income inevitably leads to a
| flood of garbage from people trying to game the system.
| The current ad-driven web resulted in SEO garbage and
| near-uselessness of search engines.
| geocar wrote:
| > writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide
| meaningful income
|
| _Should_ people receive meaningful income for writing a blog
| post every once in a while?
|
| I feel like that's the real question and not everyone agrees
| on the answer
|
| > we would be better off with free content like on the
| internet of old
|
| Well as someone who was there you used to need meaningful
| income to use the Internet of old. Nowadays everyone needs
| the Internet and it's a pretty big expense in most peoples'
| budget, and I think that's why so many people are willing to
| try _something_ at it,
|
| I figure if you just gave everyone meaningful income we could
| have that again
| 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.
| beeflet wrote:
| People have been hacking on this "if" for a while, and I
| suspect we will break through to the other side
| eventually, probably by the end of the decade. The
| problem is really just that cryptocurrencies like monero
| want to minimize their use of scripting, because
| transactions with scripts are a heuristic that can be
| used to de-anonymize you. But payment channels require
| some sort of timelock, in bitcoin this is done with HTLC
| script.
|
| There have been a number of proposals, I think the oldest
| is DLSAG: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/595.pdf There are
| other ones based on time-lock puzzles, but those have
| always been kinda crappy.
|
| It may be possible with some ZK magic I'm unfamiliar
| with. But the core of the problem is that we need to find
| a way to make a transaction valid but only after a
| certain block height, and make it so that validators
| can't learn any specific heuristics about the transaction
| (like what the block height is exactly).
|
| >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.
|
| Sure, but after the micropayments revolution there will
| also be a change in the types of sites people use,
| enabled by the new form of monetization. You could rely
| more on people posting things like videos to their
| personal blogs and interlinking them instead of having to
| shack up with one of the few sites large enough to
| support ad-funded monetization. The internet would have a
| basic spam-resistance function, so it would be less
| reliant on the existing players to gatekeep (for example,
| email, forum moderators, etc).
|
| I think it would be more competitive. Let's say you have
| a site like twitter that says "now that there are
| micropayments, we will charge you 1 cent per pageview AND
| force you to login and collect your data", well then you
| will have a competitor like xcancel.com which can charge
| 2 cents per pageview and not require login. The market
| would decide what the best model is. Right now proxy
| sites like xcancel have to do it for free. Even if they
| wanted to run ads, the ad market isn't competitive in the
| same sense because it is more profitable for larger
| players.
|
| I think you mention in your blogpost that no one would
| want to support micropayments because of piracy. I
| consider this a massive advantage of the micropayment
| system. It's pro-piracy by default. If you look at the
| origins of ad-funded sites like youtube, they started out
| as hubs of (light) piracy. The content of social media
| sites should be pirated and mirrored: they are just
| getting rich off of network effects in the first place.
| If you combine micropayments with some sort of
| bittorrent-like system, this could be very powerful.
| Imagine a decentralized archive site, where you take
| advantage of TLS to archive a verifiably timestamped
| version of a page, and anyone else can send you money
| that is conditional on you providing them a copy of that
| archive in return.
|
| Micropayments don't fund the development of new
| intellectual work, but they let you recoup the cost of
| bandwidth. He who does not host, also does not earn. If
| you want to fund the development of new work, I think you
| need patronage. We are already seeing this with a lot of
| videographers from youtube depending mostly on sites like
| patreon and donations from dedicated fans. In a
| micropayments world, you wouldn't have sites like patreon
| taking a cut. Aside from just having ~0.1c micropayments-
| per-pageview, you could have very easy p2p "mini-
| payments" on the order of ~$1 in exchange for donation
| rewards.
|
| With less money in the annoying ads economy, google and
| others would have less power to alter the web standards
| to their whim, and we could claw back features that
| enable fingerprinting. I don't know, that is just my
| dream.
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| A 14-year-old is unlikely to read/look at the same content
| as a 50-year old woman. That's how contextual advertisement
| works.
| fragmede wrote:
| contextual advertising isn't targeted advertising, yes.
| troupo wrote:
| Indeed. So no idea what your argument is about.
|
| BTW, targeted ads need to be 100% to 700% more efficient
| than regular ads to be as profitable: https://www.science
| direct.com/science/article/pii/S016781162...
| troupo wrote:
| Showing ads doesn't require invasive and pervasive 24/7
| surveilance.
| nativeit wrote:
| Give each of them $0.25/mo, and you'll probably 10x-100x what
| they're currently getting from you watching ads.
| geocar wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is false: _We 're_ the ones who pay the creator, because:
|
| > I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I
| occasionally read
|
| If that upsets you, please understand it upsets me to, because
|
| > but at the unacceptable price of privacy
|
| I want you to consider a different toothbrush brand, or maybe a
| hot location for a holiday, and the idea that I am "invading"
| your privacy in trying to do this is disconcerting.
|
| I understand there _are_ actors who want to use your private
| personalising data to harm you. I think that is bad, but I am
| telling you friend, that isn 't me.
|
| > I'm not quite sure what the answer is.
|
| Listen, as an insider _I_ am not quite sure what the answer is
| either, but I 'm telling you that content creators need to eat
| because you have threatened them with capitalism which murders
| you if you don't participate, and I am the one feeding them and
| not you.
|
| I think though, it probably takes the form of better laws that
| prevent people from using personalised data to harm you without
| public (judicial) review, and I think that is going to require
| people like you thinking of the _outcome_ that you want,
| instead of foolishly trying the impossible to conserve your
| _personal privacy_.
| 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.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Did you actually read the article? It doesn't mention GPL
| even once.
|
| And neither does the page on LibreJS, which is the tool
| he created to attempt to address the problem[1]
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/
| IshKebab wrote:
| Did you? The whole thing is about how JavaScript allows
| running nonfree (that means not GPL to him) software on
| your computer without realising it.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| > https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=IshKebab
|
| > Did you? The whole thing is about how JavaScript allows
| running nonfree (that means not GPL to him) software on
| your computer without realising it.
|
| No, Free is not the same as GPL you ignoramus.
| 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.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Oh yeah. He's been telling us for decades how technology will
| be used to oppress people. I guess he had the experience of
| how things turned out with UNIX, and knew first hand how hard
| he had to work to even have a chance at undermining them.
| What he did at a time was build something from scratch which
| was compatible with the UNIX interface. These days I would
| call that a lost battle.
|
| Imagine if you said: I'm going to undermine facebook by
| building another social network which will be Free software,
| and will be compatible with facebook. I'll federate facebook
| whether they like it or not, and I'll do that by reverse
| engineering how facebook servers talk to each other. That
| wouldn't work because it takes you huge effort to pull off,
| and it takes facebook zero effort to change the interface in
| a tiny way that breaks everythign for you. (Ok the analogy
| isn't perfect, but hopefully you get the idea of diminishing
| something's value by forcefully opening it up)
|
| But he hugely contributed to win a battle like this in the
| late 80s, then Linus Torvalds came in and finished the job in
| 1991 or so. RMS doesn't get the credit or even appreciation
| he deserves. I think he's one of the most tragic figures in
| the history of computers.
| 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...
| zie wrote:
| Even if that one particular instance is false, I seem to
| remember Target saying their model was too accurate and
| they were changing how they did things. i.e. Target
| admitted to predicting pregnancies very well.
|
| Why would they do that, if they didn't think their system
| was that good?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Maybe to convince other companies to buy Target ads.
| Advertising companies uptalk how effective their
| advertisements are to persuade other companies to buy
| adspace.
|
| Target isn't going to do something that scares away
| consumers, like say "our ad tracking is TOO good", unless
| there's another benefit that makes it net positive for
| them.
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| You do you. If you believe that you are helpless in the
| face of the temptation of advertising, you should avoid
| advertising.
|
| But it would be nice if you worked on your listening
| skills as well.
|
| You gave a list of major evils that consuming advertising
| leads to. I don't suffer from those evils. Or at least if
| I do, then I must also in serious denial to be unaware of
| it.
|
| You also seem to think that I said that I am unaffected
| by advertising, and it doesn't lead to me spending money.
| This is a bizarre conclusion given that I said that I am
| affected by advertising, and I gave an example of where
| it did lead to me spending money.
|
| But the critical difference is this. You treat
| advertising as an assault on your mind. Whose job is to
| enable evil corporations to steal your money. I view
| advertising as a discovery method. The world is full of
| innovators coming up with things that they think others
| may want. They then use advertising as a way to let
| people know that there is a thing that they may want. I
| rarely want it. But I'm willing to waste a bit of time on
| the pitch.
|
| And on the rare occasions that I do get something, I
| actually enjoy it regularly. That cup I mentioned? I just
| made tea for my wife, and served it to her in that cup.
|
| We are different people. I have a very different
| relationship to advertising than you do. The fact that it
| is different, doesn't mean that I'm wrong to be 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.
| nativeit wrote:
| This is also covered in the article. I appreciated the
| analogy they used: You can put on a ski mask when you go
| to the mall, and it will conceal your identity, but you
| will also be instantly suspicious to everyone around you,
| and will likely be asked to leave most of the stores you
| try to visit.
| codedokode wrote:
| This is only because there are only 0.001% of people
| using anonymizers. If you are a minority with specific
| requirements, you are shown the door almost in any case,
| not only on the Internet.
| ashman5 wrote:
| Orion browser is also capable of running uBlock Origin (not
| Lite) on iOS.
| mmooss wrote:
| To ask the obvious question: Doesn't blocking fingerprinters
| itself fingerprint the browser.
|
| (Also, what is a 'fingerprinter'? Isn't it something that
| runs server-side, out of reach of the browser, based on data
| collected?)
| h33t-l4x0r wrote:
| No it's usually a javascript script that does weird things
| like drawing strings on an invisible canvas and sends it
| back to the server. I'm wondering if a browser extension
| that intercepts those payloads and randomizes them with
| other people's payloads is what's called for here.
| 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
| ifh-hn wrote:
| Isn't ghostry compromised? Having been bought out by an
| ad company?
| nativeit wrote:
| As near as I can tell, it's always been owned by Cliqz,
| who produced some privacy-focused browsers (named Dawn or
| Lumen) and a search engine (Tailcat) that was ultimately
| purchased by Brave. The whole thing is majority owned by
| a German media group, Hubert Burda Media, and while its
| missions towards increased privacy seem to be sincere, I
| don't know if I'd trust them implicitly.
|
| All that said, the main project looks to be open sourced
| under a GPL3 license, so distrust and verify:
| https://github.com/ghostery
| tempest_ wrote:
| Honestly I did not know.
|
| I have had it installed so long I don't even remember
| when I did it.
|
| Ill look more into it and perhaps re-evaluate
| 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.
| nativeit wrote:
| I guess it's fortunate that this quote only includes a
| portion of the assertion they're making. What happens
| when you include the rest?
| bandrami wrote:
| > any type of web pages with javascript being illegal
|
| Inshallah
| geocar wrote:
| I suppose it depends on what you mean by "modern"
|
| In Europe we have the GDPR which does exactly this
| dminuoso wrote:
| The GPDR is not criminal law. But ignoring that,
| regulators barely pursue GPDR violations.
|
| Consider the swaths of dark patterns surrounding cookie
| terror banners. The GPDR language is extremely clear that
| none of them are legal, but virtually nobody is ever
| punished.
| geocar wrote:
| > The GPDR is not criminal law
|
| While the GDPR does not directly prescribe prison
| sentences, it absolutely enables countries to establish
| criminal offences for severe data protection violations,
| and they will clearly extradite!
|
| https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-
| blogs...
|
| https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-
| blogs...
|
| > But ignoring that,
|
| No don't ignore that. When you're so completely wrong
| about the first thing you say, everything that follows is
| going to be even more wrong.
|
| > Consider ... cookie ... banners. The GPDR language is
| extremely clear that none of them are legal
|
| You are confusing the ePrivacy directive (2002/58/EC)
| with the GDPR (2016/679).
| 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.
| maks198 wrote:
| >Firefox w/ the Arkenfox user.js is probably as good as it gets
| in terms of privacy.
|
| No. It's LARP. You either don't care or go with Tor Browser
| and/or commercial antidetect browsers.
|
| But you shouldn't care, this issue of fingerprinting is
| overblown. (really reminds me of AI)
| ykonstant wrote:
| Unfortunately, recently more and more sites fail to work with
| Tor Browser. Notably, I am informed by people who are not me,
| Anna's archive and libgen.
| integralid wrote:
| The sites block Tor, not fail to work with Tor browser
| itself. I know this is a meaningless distinction for end
| user.
|
| In theory you could use Tor browser with Tor stripped (I
| heard this is what mullvad browser is?) or go tor-then-
| proxy (this is what I often do, because I sometimes use
| whonix at work). I don't know about libgen or Anna's
| archive, I don't use them.
| 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| In the end all this shit we have to deal with is probably
| 99% used for deciding which ads to show you, which we are
| gonna block anyway, and it's all a complete and utter waste
| of computing power and electricity. This is how big tech
| "makes the world a better place" apparently.
| pteraspidomorph wrote:
| If you enable privacy.resistFingerprinting in about:config I
| believe instead of trying to prevent fingerprinting entirely,
| it's supposed to make things annoying for the fingerprinters
| by regularly changing the various spoofed factors.
| 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.
| drnick1 wrote:
| Arkenfox does far more than that, just look at the user.js.
| Among others, it spoofs the time zone, number of cores,
| window size and many other attributes that assist
| fingerprinting. It basically mimics the settings of the Tor
| browser.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| privacy.resistFingerprinting = true is basically activating
| most of the Tor browser features in baseline Firefox.
| That's why it is turned off by default. It does all the
| things you listed above only at a lower level than a user
| script. It's been in Firefox for over a decade.
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/01/a-history-of-
| fingerprintin...
|
| The flag was in fact designed to control the activation of
| the Tor browser uplift features, and reduce maintenance
| issues. That way the Tor browser could pretty much just be
| Firefox with certain flags turned on.
| 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.
|
| EDIT: I'll add that using these tools outside of normal
| browsing use can be useful for obfuscating who's doing specific
| browsing, but it should be emphasized that using fingerprinting
| masking in isolation all the time is nearly as useful as not
| using them at all.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Basically the XKCD license plate comic:
| https://xkcd.com/1105/
| nativeit wrote:
| Has anyone wrote software that automatically surfaces the
| relevant XKCD comic for every article this happens under?
|
| I'd like a feature in my HN reader that sticks a red button
| at the bottom anytime XKCD has already made the points I'm
| reading.
| faidit wrote:
| We should go further and make an AI agent that creates
| counterfeit XKCD comics of dubious quality for literally
| every scenario.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Randal had a long career of good takes, until around 2016
| when they stopped being objectively good.
|
| I'm not kidding at all, that my guess is he was doing
| drugs and stopped.
| koolba wrote:
| > Randal had a long career of good takes, until around
| 2016 when they stopped being objectively good.
|
| Specifically it was at this point in 2016:
| https://xkcd.com/1756/
|
| > I'm not kidding at all, that my guess is he was doing
| drugs and stopped.
|
| I don't know if he stopped or started, but something
| changed.
| franga2000 wrote:
| A person used their relatively large platform to tell
| people that they don't support a crazy lunatic
| millionaire running the world's most powerful country?
| How scandalous!
|
| In the USA, 2016 and onwards wasn't "just an election".
| It was something between a mildly harmful establishment
| candidate or a useless new face on one side, and "holy
| fucking shit are we actually letting this deranged
| wannabe monarch run for office?!?" on the other.
|
| Give the man a break, it was (the start of) a crazy time,
| I'm actually surprised more creators didn't do something
| like this. If anything, it was barely even a political
| statement, more of a "hey fellow dems, go vote!" type
| thing.
| sdoering wrote:
| Couldn't have said it better. But hey, they made their
| bed...
| cortesoft wrote:
| Coming our against a candidate that literally said the
| words "grab them by the pussy" is a bad thing?
| naniwaduni wrote:
| 1357 (2014-04-18) is pretty bad.
|
| (Bonus points for the alt-text argument being isomorphic
| to nothing-to-hide.)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| As far as "obligatory xkcd" is concerned: 3154, 3155,
| 3159, 3160, 3162, 3165 and 3167 are all relevant. (I've
| found myself citing 3155 a lot, in attempts to
| deradicalise cranks: it _sometimes_ works, if I can
| convince them to quit ChatGPT cold-turkey.)
|
| It's fine to like the comics before around 2016, and
| dislike the ones afterwards, but there's nothing
| objective about that. Various people have put forward
| various thresholds for when xkcd "stopped being good",
| but ultimately it boils down to a combination of what TV
| Tropes would call "Tone Shift" and "They Changed It, Now
| It Sucks!".
| sdoering wrote:
| Wow. Not liking their political views equals doing drugs.
|
| Must be an interesting place, that originates these
| "arguments".
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| I think you misread. They said the opposite: that he was
| taking drugs and his takes were good, then he stopped
| taking drugs and now they're bad.
|
| I'm not saying I agree or that I even think his takes
| have gotten worse, just clarifying what the other poster
| said.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| You can and should be using a good VPN to make the masked
| fingerprint and IP address non-unique.
| thrw888 wrote:
| I have packed ff with arkenfox js into container and maybe a
| handful other people use it
| https://github.com/grzegorzk/ff_in_podman. Still, most likely
| the IP address alone is probably the strongest part of
| fingerprint vector Maybe instead it would be better to have
| very different vector each time?
| DavideNL wrote:
| > " _There 's no point unless a critical mass of people use
| these tools_"
|
| That's what Mullvad Browser attempts to solve i guess:
|
| https://mullvad.net/en/browser
| 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.
| bradleyankrom wrote:
| Privacy tax, sigh
| mmooss wrote:
| > Basically, it makes Firefox expose the same information as
| the Tor browser.
|
| Is it based on the Tor browser?
|
| Some solutions, like Tor browser or GrapheneOS, are engineered
| for the purpose.
|
| Some free online tools are an aggregation of ideas from social
| media and someone's personal understanding. These solutions can
| have limited benefits or be worse than the problem. Many
| settings don't work as expected, there are unintended
| consequences (such as making the browser more unique and easier
| to fingerprint), unusual combinations of settings can have
| unintended consequences or break things (Mozilla can't test
| every combination of about:config settings).
| potato-peeler wrote:
| Firefox already provides this feature in about:config using
| resist fingerprint - https://support.mozilla.org/en-
| US/kb/resist-fingerprinting
| 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.
| udev4096 wrote:
| The ignorance and disinformation is off the charts. Do you
| see "browsing" in my response? It's only for that, you
| don't login to your real accounts with it. It's only
| discouraged to use ANY extensions with TBB
|
| > Tor Browser as a privacy measure is likely no better than
| a normal browser with uBlock
|
| Why tell the whole world how fucking dumb you are? Tor
| browser has been developing anti-fingerprinting techniques
| long before you even heard the word being thrown around.
| 2M+ userbase is enough to hide among and stop fucking
| complaining. It's a non-profit, people run relays
| voluntarily and that's the current best way to thwart
| fingerprinting attempts
| 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.
| nativeit wrote:
| The problem we're falling into under this (ostensibly
| accurate) point is when we start making this a game, where
| fingerprinting is either "100% effective and insidious", or
| "can't be 100% certain 100% of the time, so it's ineffective
| and nobody will use it against me".
|
| The point is that a sufficiently motivated actor could use a
| very broad array of tactics, some automated and some manual,
| to identify, observe, track, and/or locate a target. Maybe
| they can't pin you down with your browser fingerprints
| because you've been smart enough to use tools that obfuscate
| it, but that's not happening in a vacuum. Correlating one
| otherwise useless datapoint that happens to persist long
| enough to tie things together at even low-ish confidence is
| still a hugely worthwhile sieve with which to filter people
| out of the possibility pool.
|
| The problem isn't that it doesn't affect most average people,
| or that it it's terribly imprecise. The problem is that it's
| even a little effective, while being nearly impossible to
| completely avoid. It's also a problem if that's used by a
| malicious state actor against a journalist, to pick a rather
| obvious example. Because even in isolation, this kind of
| violation of civil liberties necessarily impacts _all_ of
| society.
|
| The public should be given more information and control,
| broadly speaking, for when they are asked to trade their
| rights for convenience, security, and/or commerce. In
| particular, I think the United States has allowed bad faith
| arguments against regulatory actions and basic consumer
| rights so corporate lobbyists can steamroll any chance of
| even baseline protections. It would behoove all of us to be
| more distrustful of companies and moneyed interests, while
| being more engaged with, and demanding of, our governments.
| 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.
| disambiguation wrote:
| Correct, however:
|
| > By following users over time, as their fingerprints changed,
| they could guess when a fingerprint was an 'upgraded' version
| of a previously observed browser's fingerprint, with 99.1% of
| guesses correct.
|
| https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/static/browser-uniqueness.pd...
|
| https://mullvad.net/en/browser/browser-fingerprinting
| collinmanderson wrote:
| > If I have a process that randomly installs and deletes wacky
| fonts, I'm unique at any given time
|
| Technically for fonts, there's no API for listing installed
| fonts, so trackers have to check each font by name. Likely they
| won't be checking super obscure font names.
|
| That method might help for other signals though.
| 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...
| nativeit wrote:
| How to scream, "I'm living a life of unalloyed privilege."
| 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?
| arbol wrote:
| Do you have a repo for this?
| 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.
| dwg wrote:
| > ...severe consequences for data breaches...
|
| Often had the same thought, if not shared same opinion. On the
| other hand, stiffer penalties have the trade off of
| incentivizing cover-ups, i.e. disincentivize honest disclosure.
| stego-tech wrote:
| And that's where I'd need other SMEs in the room to help
| craft policy. Enough of us agree that the status quo is
| untenable, but we lack a clear vision to change it still. I
| know where I stand, but I don't know what I don't know.
| 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.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Arguments for both are derived from, but not explicit in, the
| Bill of Rights. Privacy has broad points of support while
| anonymity is primarily attributed to the First Amendment, but
| only in narrow circumstances.
| 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.
| slig 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.
|
| Why use a third party service when cookies can do exactly that?
| They load their .js from the same domain they set up a cookie
| and there's no limitation to read that cookie, correct?
| 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!
| nativeit wrote:
| Beyond the notion that no org should be trusted implicitly,
| why would the EFF specifically be untrustworthy?
| baxuz wrote:
| Was just about to ask the same.
| 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
| onion2k wrote:
| I'd read it more generously than that. I think Chrome trying
| to stop _the server_ choosing the language for you. By
| sending an accepts-language header (which your browser does
| regardless of what you use; it 's not a Chrome thing) the
| server _should_ return the page in a language you 've said
| you'll accept. By adding the language to what you've told
| Chrome not to translate, it's attempting to show you pages in
| languages you want.
|
| I imagine Chrome is really adding the language to your
| browser preferences when you choose not to translate a page,
| and the HTTP client in the browser is generating request
| headers based on your preferred languages. A small (and
| largely unimportant) semantic point, but it's possible that
| the Google translate team weren't aware of how adding a
| preferred language might impact user privacy. That isn't to
| excuse the behaviour; they should have checked.
| 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.
| hopelite wrote:
| Which really puts a massive spotlight on you.
| autoexec wrote:
| Most people using chrome are also using Google's DNS servers
| too which hands them a list of every single domain you visit.
| 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
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| privacy.resistFingerprinting has potentially-unwanted
| side-effects, like wiping out most of your browser
| history (instead of the more sensible approach of just
| disabling purple links). I also recall something about it
| getting removed or nerfed, though I'm not sure whether
| that was a mere proposal.
| noisem4ker wrote:
| It also does (or at least used to) mess with dates, due
| to it attempting to hide what time zone you're in.
| godshatter wrote:
| The browser should reasonably know what time zone you're
| in and what time zone you're reporting to the website and
| translate between them automatically.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| It does not wipe your browser history. I can definitely
| attest to that since my generic JS active +
| resistFingerprinting profile has a history going back
| years. It does set your timezone to UTC in JS on
| websites. I've mostly encountered that when playing
| Wordle ;)
| jijijijij wrote:
| Every time I manually touched the "fingerprinting"
| about:config settings, my entropy went up. I used the EFF
| site to test: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
|
| AFAIK some of these options are there to be used by the
| Tor browser, which comes with strict configuration
| assumptions, and it doesn't translate well to normal
| Firefox usage. Especially if you change the window size
| on a non-standardized device. Mind you, the goal is not
| to block fingerprinting, but to not stand out. Safari on
| a macbook is probably harder to fingerprint than Firefox
| on your soldering iron.
|
| However, judging by the fact that every data hungry
| website seemingly has a huge problem with VPN usage, I'd
| presume they are pretty effective and fingerprinting is
| not.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| I've had good success with tracking tool tests and
| resistFingerprinting. Granted, I usually use it with
| uMatrix/NoScript most of the time which cuts down on the
| available data a lot and maybe makes it an unfair test.
| One issue, I expect, is simply not enough people using
| resist fingerprinting to add variation to the mix. Since
| it's off by default, and only a small % of users use
| Firefox and an even tinier percentage use
| resistFingerprinting, unlike your example of Tor where
| probably most people on the tor network use the tor
| browser, it's likely that simply blocking things is a
| fingerprint all on its own. The solution there would be
| to get more people using it :)
|
| I will say one downside to using it is far more bot
| detection websites freaking out over generic information
| being returned to them, causing some sites to break (some
| of their settings breaking webgl games too due to low
| values). Using a different profile avoids this, or
| explicitly whitelisting certain sites in
| privacy.resistFingerprinting.exemptedDomains - obviously
| if a site is using a generic tracking service for bot
| detection, that kills a fair amount of the benefit of the
| flag, so a separate profile might be best. I wish firefox
| had a container option for this.
|
| ... and. not too sure what you mean by changing window
| size on a non-standardised device. They do try to ensure
| the window sizes are at standard intervals, as if they
| were fullscreened at typical widths to reduce
| fingerprinting, but surely that applies to using Tor too?
| I mean, people don't use Tor on dedicated monitors at
| standard sizes.
| 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?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| This is my question also. I tend to not use apps, use
| DuckDuckGo browser.
|
| I sometimes do use Safari which is a more convenient
| browser - it would be ironic if DDG browser is less
| private than Safari.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Modern Safari is pretty damned good at randomizing
| fingerprints with Intelligent Tracking Prevention. With IOS
| 26 and MacOS 26, it's enabled in both private and non
| private browser windows (used to be only in private mode).
|
| All "fingerprint" tests I've run have returned good
| results.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I haven't tried 26, but I remember it didn't used to be
| so great.
| drnick1 wrote:
| Unfortunately, it's closed source and only available on
| Apple devices.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I only use it when I want to be tracked.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| That will just make you stand out more.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| You can change the reported UA header independently of the
| UA you use.
| michaelt wrote:
| If I was a fingerprinting company, I'd be cross-
| referencing signals between browsers for sure.
|
| If the browser header says windows but the fonts
| available says linux, that's a very distinctive signal.
|
| And if the UA says Chrome but some other signal says not-
| chrome, that's very distinctive as well.
| nativeit wrote:
| You said it better than I did.
| biztos wrote:
| Surely this is true, but if you're a fingerprinting
| company aren't you making so much money violating the
| privacy of the masses that it's not worth your time going
| after the tiny set of Freedom Nerds trying to evade you?
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| They aren't specifically going after you... they just try
| to create a unique hash from everything they can and by
| doing weird things to your system you are making a truly
| unique hash easier
| jijijijij wrote:
| Yeah, and my passwords are so obvious and stupid,
| nobody's gonna guess them!
|
| I think, you are falling for a technical fallacy. It's
| not costing them any more time.
| nativeit wrote:
| The article also mentions this, and suggests the UA is
| not a silver bullet. That said, they didn't go into
| specifics. I'm assuming there are other details that
| correlate to particular browsers that will betray a false
| UA. Plus, having a UA that says Chrome while including an
| extension that's exclusive to Safari (tor example) will
| not only contradict the UA, but it will also be a highly
| distinctive datapoint for fingerprinting, in and of
| itself.
| codedokode wrote:
| You can change the header, but browser developers are not
| that dumb and they added properties like
| "navigator.platform" which do not change and immediately
| give you away. Consider also writing a browser extension
| to patch these properties. Also, I think that DRM module
| (widewine), that is bundled with browsers, also can
| report the actual software version. Sadly it is
| undocumented so I don't know what information it can
| provide, but I notice warnings from Firefox about
| attempts to use DRM on various sites like Yandex Market.
| nikcub wrote:
| don't use the same browser regardless - the key is to
| compartmentalise.
| faidit wrote:
| Translating pages is literally the only thing I use Chrome
| for. The built-in translation works way better than other
| browsers, even though they also use Google Translate.
| geocar wrote:
| I don't think safari uses google translate
| gagik_co wrote:
| The new built-in translation in Firefox works pretty well!
| I never need to fallback to others, although forcing it to
| translate has weird UX.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Firefox does not use Google Translate and performs the
| translation locally, which works great for the most common
| languages out there. For the less common ones you still
| have to go to Google Translate, but IME it's definitely not
| worth changing the browser to Chrome over.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Yeah I really like the Firefox translate. A rare win for
| recent Firefox.
| echelon wrote:
| Ditching Chrome is something we need to teach everyone.
|
| The DOJ is totally spineless and refuses to squash
| Google's absurd monopoly on the internet. We are
| literally the last line of defense, even though we really
| don't amount to much.
|
| Perhaps we could start a grassroots movement.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| You don't need a grassroots movement when other movements
| doing this exact thing already exist. In fact it is
| likely counterproductive. Mozilla Foundation is the
| organization you want to support, or EFF.
| echelon wrote:
| > Mozilla Foundation is the organization you want to
| support
|
| Mozilla Foundation is rudderless. I'm convinced the
| leadership are all Google plants who are keeping the
| "antitrust litigation sponge" from doing anything
| damaging to Chrome.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I don't really like firefox translate, despite having
| made the switch many years ago. For a long time it didnt
| have the (european) language of the country I live in.
| Now it does have it. Every time I want it to translate I
| have to manually find both languages in the insanely long
| dropdowns. It will not save it the way I want it, but
| impressively seems to manage to always save it in the
| other direction...
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| There is an extension called twp or something like that for
| firefox. IME it is pretty good
| andrepd wrote:
| Sorry but you're using a Google browser and Google
| translation service, when excellent alternatives to both
| exist. What did you expect regarding privacy?
|
| A clueless person might not know any better, but you
| clearly do, and also you seemingly care. So why do you use
| Google all the same?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| PSA only use Mullvad or Tails which are set up to be as bland
| and uniform as possible
| h33t-l4x0r wrote:
| Except I don't want to be flagged as a bot when I'm just
| visiting some website in my browser. (I also don't want to
| be flagged as a bot when I'm scraping some website with a
| bot).
| autoexec wrote:
| As uniform as possible is exactly the wrong way to go. It
| only takes one data point overlooked or newly discovered to
| make every person trying to look identical distinct. New
| fingerprinting techniques are being implemented all the
| time, so what's the point in taking chances when it's far
| easier to randomly change a browsers fingerprint for each
| site/connection making it much harder to track any one
| browser over time.
| 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.
| jm4 wrote:
| What language do you put that list in? Would you still want
| to show it to every visitor when you know most of them speak
| a particular language?
|
| I use to do some work in this area. The first question is
| difficult and the second is no. We had the best results when
| we used various methods to detect the preferred language and
| then put up a language selector with a welcome message in
| that language. After they made a selection, it would stick on
| return visits.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > What language do you put that list in? Would you still
| want to show it to every visitor when you know most of them
| speak a particular language?
|
| Judging by... a _large_ number of websites, you make the
| list available in a topbar, and each language is named in
| itself. You don 't apply one language to the entire list.
|
| Here's the first page that popped into my head as one that
| would probably offer multiple languages (and it does!):
|
| https://www.dyson.com/en
|
| They've got the list in a page footer instead of a header,
| but otherwise it's an absolutely standard language
| selector. It does technically identify countries rather
| than languages. The options range from Az@rbaycan to
| Ukrayina. They are -- _of course_ -- displayed to every
| visitor.
|
| Why would you want to force someone to consume your website
| in the wrong language?
|
| And why would the list be in a single language, again?
| jm4 wrote:
| You're looking at it with the perspective of someone who
| understands the language the site defaults to. Most non-
| native speakers have a hard time finding the link and
| they leave.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No, I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who
| has needed to use that language selector in the past.
| Understanding the language the site defaults to wouldn't
| help, because _the selector doesn 't use that language
| anyway_.
|
| > Most non-native speakers have a hard time finding the
| link
|
| You might notice the colorful flag right next to it.
| codedokode wrote:
| You can determine user's language from IP address location.
| Of course, there are users with VPNs, but they probably are
| used to seeing foreign content. For example, Youtube shows
| me advertisement in a language I don't understand despite
| my language header saying I only understand "en-US" and
| "en" languages. So this header is unnecessary, even Youtube
| ignores it.
|
| Also, when using VPN, Google typically uses a language
| based on IP address, not my language header. I assume the
| header is only useful for fingerprinting today.
| Juliate wrote:
| More and more international audiences websites literally do
| this themselves, putting a language (sometimes even currency)
| select box option on top when they detect your settings don't
| match best at first the page you are on.
|
| Why not have this negotiation implemented at the browser
| level?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Because that prevents all of your users from selecting the
| language they want. It's a terrible idea with no upside and
| not-high-but-still-not-no downside.
| Juliate wrote:
| It doesn't, because that's an optional negotiation. Try
| Apple.com in a different country/locale than yours,
| you'll see how it behaves.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It has a remarkably inconspicuous language selector, also
| using the names of countries rather than languages,
| located in the page footer. Compared to Dyson, Apple's
| list of country names is much more willing to use English
| in preference to whatever someone from that country would
| call it. This isn't consistent; many countries are
| rendered in their own language (Ri Ben / Ellada) and
| many aren't (Georgia / Kazakhstan).
|
| The page defaults to the locale that you request in the
| URL. https://www.apple.com/ shows up in English,
| regardless of your country;+ https://www.apple.com/bg/
| shows up in Bulgarian. Switching your preferred location
| simply takes you to the page for that location. (Dyson
| does the same thing.) Some locations support more than
| one language; there's https://www.apple.com/lae/ for
| Latin America (English) and https://www.apple.com/la/ for
| Latin America (Spanish). If you're on the page for a
| location like this, a language selector (with language
| names) displays next to the location selector. In the
| case of Latin America, only two languages are supported,
| and the language selector automatically displays
| "Espanol" if you're on the English site and "English" if
| you're on the Spanish site, which makes sense but won't
| generalize.
|
| Apple's selector is inconspicuous because it refuses to
| display flags, which I would guess is due to much higher
| political exposure than Dyson. So it's lower-quality in
| two ways, but fundamentally the same approach. The user
| asks for a language, and the site honors that.
|
| Given that I presented Dyson as an example of doing
| language selection correctly, I'm confused about what you
| wanted me to see on apple.com. They're trying to do the
| right thing, but less effectively.
|
| + I tested this by accessing the site(s) from Mongolia,
| Vietnam, and Morocco using ExpressVPN.
| biztos wrote:
| How does it determine the order?
|
| Clearly it thinks you prefer Chinese to German. Was that
| correlated with the frequency of your requests on Google
| Translate? With your browsing history? With your shopping
| history?
| RamRodification wrote:
| $lang_header = $lang_header +
| $the_lang_choice_that_was_just_made
| zzo38computer wrote:
| This is a problem, that the software will try to guess what you
| mean by such things like this (it is not specific to this
| feature, but other features of computer programs in general;
| this is one specific case of that). Just because you do not
| want it to translate such a language (or any other langage)
| automatically does not necessarily mean that you can read it or
| that you want to request documents written in that language.
| Fingerprinting is not the only issue with this.
| 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...)
| coppsilgold wrote:
| Mullvad Browser is just Tor Browser without tor.
|
| Among all the available browsers, mullvad/tor browser is the
| best we have in terms of fingerprinting resistance.
| 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?
| charcircuit wrote:
| A counter argument is that stalking in itself, in the US at
| least, is not unlawful. It becomes unlawful once someone starts
| threatening another person. So the digital analog would be to
| allow tracking as long as the site doing the tracking doesn't
| threaten the people that are being tracked.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| You're talking about the law today, and I concede. Why don't
| we change it so it becomes lawful. No one wants to be
| stalked, and notwithstanding the exceptions I mentioned, no
| one should have to endure the harassment. There is no
| scenario where one person would legitimately have a right or
| a need to stalk another person (unless financial gain is a
| legitimate reason).
| t_mann wrote:
| What I don't get, all this data is reported by your machine - why
| isn't there a tool/browser fork that allows spoofing a (fairly)
| complete realistic profile, with some sane presets like
| Edge/W11/Thinkpad or Safari/macOS/M4? Is it too complex, would it
| break too much, or am I just unaware?
| nativeit wrote:
| Most privacy-thumping browsers do this, to some degree, but
| it's not a panacea. The article gets into it.
| t_mann wrote:
| The article mentions some complications and browsers like
| LibreWolf that address some of them. But that's not really
| what I have in mind - I'm thinking more of a dashboard with
| editable fields for everything that might get queried,
| populated with what currently gets sent, and a drop-down that
| lets you select among preset/saved custom profiles.
| arbol wrote:
| There are browsers that people use for multi accounting that
| switch fingerprints for you. See octobrowser and other similar
| ones. They're generally paid products and need to work in
| conjunction with proxies
| kxrm wrote:
| So there seems to be some confusion around fingerprinting related
| to identifying characteristics and tracking. These are two
| different things. Setting your timezone to UTC, masks that one
| characteristic of your "identity". But there are better signals
| for location than timezone, like GeoIP. Same with hiding
| capabilities. All this does is make the web harder for you but it
| doesn't make your untrackable. Trackability comes from a
| combination of factors both within and out of your browser's
| control. If you share your IP with a family of 4, and you go
| changing your request headers you are only making yourself MORE
| trackable. The fact that one request comes across with UTC as a
| timezone and others come back with EST or other timezones, means
| I now can track a single user on this single IP. This is made
| worse if you and your family are using different browsers or
| different devices.
|
| So what do we care about? If you care about being untrackable,
| then you have a couple of options, rotate VPNs, or cycle your
| public facing IP often. Additionally, every request you make MUST
| change up the request headers. You could cycle between 50
| different sets of headers. Combine these two and you will likely
| be very hard to fingerprint.
|
| If you only care about being identified, use Tor + the Tor
| browser which makes A LOT of traffic look identical.
| Refreeze5224 wrote:
| The real problem here is not technical, it's political. None of
| this should be legal, let alone the basis of companies worth
| hundreds of billions. This is surveillance capitalism, and is
| incredibly harmful to society in a multitude of ways. And as long
| as the owning class is able to dictate what's legal, this
| injustice will continue.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| Stupid question but what happens to fingerprinting if you just
| disabled JavaScript? Sure it breaks websites, but that's what I
| do with ubo advanced, which I also use to block webrtc, etc. (I
| really miss umatrix for this purpose). Am I fingerprinted because
| a site can't run JavaScript? If I use a VPN too?
| dempedempe wrote:
| Yeah. You are fingerprinted if you disable JS and/or use a VPN.
| Read the article for more info.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| I did but I don't think I understand how it's that bad,
| random IP address with JavaScript disabled is 2 data points
| that can't, as far as I can see, be really helpful in
| identifying me. Seems like you're fingerprinted anyway so the
| less you give the better...
| dempedempe wrote:
| Just having JS disabled narrows you down by a lot. Yeah,
| fingerprinters can't use a lot of their more sophisticated
| techniques, but they still have a lot to work with as I
| understand it. I'm no expert though.
| diogenes_atx wrote:
| Useful site to see what info your browser is giving out:
|
| https://amiunique.org/
| xp84 wrote:
| On articles like this always I see a lot of people bragging about
| how they've pimped out their browser(s) to make themselves
| "untrackable" (or proposals to make new ways of tracking
| impossible) but nobody ever brags about how lack of "tracking"
| has positively impacted their lives.
|
| I do block ads on the web with UBlock Origin because there's no
| pay option to opt-out of it and ads ruin the experience. But I
| don't give a fig about tracking. Change my mind. Why would the
| average person enjoy a better life if they became untrackable on
| the Web?
| fggabb wrote:
| Whether or not they would enjoy a better life doesn't matter if
| there's no way to avoid your assumed preferences being tied to
| your devices, and for it to know the preferences of those you
| spend time with, those you work with, where you go, etc.
|
| Though, from what I understand, overall the fingerprinting
| success rate is only about 30%.
| sroussey wrote:
| One time fingerprinting, sure. But if you collate tracking
| info from a hundred sources or so, you pretty much have
| person, name, email, and location.
| WillAdams wrote:
| People being untrackable in general ensures that folks who need
| to be untrackable are more easily able to achieve that goal ---
| the world is a much darker place if journalists are hindered in
| researching stories.
| mac-attack wrote:
| > nobody ever brags about how lack of "tracking" has positively
| impacted their lives
|
| This reminds me of the anti-vax logic a tad in that they lack
| the imagination on the seemingly obvious effects of their ideal
| world.
|
| Being indifferent to companies and political parties (which
| becomes your Gov't when voted into power) indirectly states
| that you are indifferent to others attempts to influence you
| and/or foolhardy enough to believe that all of your beliefs
| consistently originates from objective personal experience.
| tejohnso wrote:
| The average person probably won't notice or care otherwise this
| would be a much more publicized issue. The average person also
| doesn't care that their refrigerator and television phone home,
| their calls and data are slurped up by the NSA, and their
| location can be tracked through their cell phone and vehicle
| movements.
|
| However, just because the average person doesn't notice and
| doesn't care, it doesn't mean that their life can't be ruined
| at some point because of these things. You never know when
| you're suddenly going to be targeted for something you may or
| may not have done.
| left-struck wrote:
| I think about this sometimes as I do a lot of things attempt to
| protect my privacy and keep control of what I'm paying
| attention to (ie not doom scrolling / shorts, carefully
| controlling notifications). So I make a lot of sacrifices
| including my time in order to maintain control over my
| technology.
|
| I think it's not possible for me to say if my life is really
| better, because it's the whole road not taken thing. It's not
| possible to know and so it's not worth agonising over, but I'm
| choosing to live according to my values at least, and that
| seems valuable.
| nativeit wrote:
| Is this before or after ICE became a $150B secret paramilitary
| beholden to a corrupt authoritarian with a large cohort of
| sycophantic tech billionaires?
| xp84 wrote:
| I'm not an illegal immigrant so I'm not worried about it
| mmooss wrote:
| That is short-sighted for many reasons that I don't need to
| mention.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| Neither are many of the people ICE has beaten and detained,
| didn't save them, won't save you.
| dartharva wrote:
| I have one! Because of my anti-tracking measures, all social
| media platforms still don't seem to have a profile on me for
| content preferences, and so fail to show me the hyper-curated
| slop they do to everyone else. What I see instead is a classic
| feed of the best content generally trending across the world,
| pre-2010 style. That's one way it has impacted my life.
|
| Another way is the security and peace of mind it gives me while
| living in a country that has a behemoth population of bad
| actors online. Everyone I know has fallen to at least one
| targeted cyber-scam or the other. I haven't.
| blharr wrote:
| This tracking absolutely has impacted the average person. Have
| you noticed how addictive the social media algorithms are
| today? Pretty much everyone I know struggles to get off their
| recommended or "for you" tab at this point. It literally is
| rooted in tracking how long you spend on each piece of media,
| rewarding and delaying that reward based on what will hook you
| the most. If you start disabling tracking and anonymizing your
| browser, it suddenly all becomes really clear how unnecessary
| the content really is...
| stickfigure wrote:
| We can start by getting rid of (freezing) the User-Agent header.
| No need to make it easy.
| kuon wrote:
| It is not really fingerprinting but I realized that ipinfo can
| place my IP on my house. I guess some stupid phone sent the GPS
| location. Isn't that supposedly under GDPR in Europe? Can I
| delete it somehow?
| gausswho wrote:
| I want a spoofing tool. How would one go about sending all my
| browser's traffic through a proxy that swapped out
| fingerprintable aspects with those of selectable presets of the
| most common browser configurations? It'd help to be able to
| bypass certain details for a whitelist domains that actually
| needed granular exceptions. Most websites don't need this data
| for serving you.
| beefnugs wrote:
| There was just a youtube video of a penetration tester showing a
| screencap of some hacker: they used something called "octo
| browser" to act like their target as they used stolen cookies to
| login as hacked targets.
|
| Seems like we all need to come together and use the same
| technique to "we are borg, we are browsing your internet as one,
| tracking is futile"
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Isn't it forbidden on the EU anyways - thanks to GDPR?
| metek wrote:
| I've recently started going full send and using Ad-Nauseaum
| instead of simply using an ad-blocker. I've even started
| seriously boning up on Javascript to see if I can come up with
| some horribly hacky :click:hover:focus smokescreen sideload.
|
| I'm sick to death of companies thinking they have any right to
| keep tabs on me because they think it'll make them a buck.
| uoaei wrote:
| It's moderately inconvenient to
| tzury wrote:
| The OP argues that fingerprinting is a "privacy nightmare," but
| we need to look at why it exists.
|
| From a pragmatic perspective, we are forcing two very different
| networks to run on the same protocols:
|
| _The Business Internet:_ Banking, SaaS, and VC-funded content
| (Meta /Google).
|
| _The Fun Internet:_ Hobby blogs, Lego fan sites, and the
| "GeoCities" spirit.
|
| You cannot have a functioning "Business Internet" without
| identity verification. If you try to perform a transaction (or
| even just use a subsidized "free" tool like Gmail) while hiding
| behind a generic, non-unique fingerprint, you look
| indistinguishable from a bot or a fraudster.
|
| Fingerprinting is often just the immune system of the commercial
| web trying to verify you are human.
|
| The friction arises because we expect the "Fun Internet" to play
| by different rules. A Lego fan site shouldn't need to know who I
| am. But because we access both the Lego site and our Bank using
| the same browser, the same IP, and the same free tools
| (Chrome/Search), the "Fun Internet" becomes collateral damage of
| the "Business Internet's" need for security and monetization.
|
| We can't have it both ways. We accepted the SLA for the "Business
| Internet" in exchange for free, billion-dollar tools. If you want
| 100% anonymity, you are effectively asking to use the commercial
| web's infrastructure without providing the identity signal it
| runs on.
|
| As the OP notes, mitigation is hard. But that's not just because
| advertisers are "evil"--it's because on the modern web, anonymity
| looks exactly like a security threat.
| domenicd wrote:
| This is an excellent insight.
|
| I think there is still some hope that technical solutions could
| be developed so that only the "Business Internet" gets access
| to verified identity, with the user somehow understanding this,
| while the "Fun Internet" doesn't have such capabilities. This
| is what stood behind, e.g., Google's proposed WEI [1] that got
| such huge backlash, or Apple's Private Access Tokens [2] which
| are essentially the same thing but quietly slipped under the
| community radar.
|
| Other proposals are Google's in-limbo Private State Tokens [3],
| or the various digital-wallet/age verification proposals (I
| think Apple and Google both have stuff in that space).
|
| But even basic stuff, like IP protection, can really throw off
| the anti-fraud and anti-botnet mechanisms. Your Lego fan site
| wants to be behind a CDN for speed and protection from DDOS?
| Well, people using VPNs or in Incognito mode might end up
| inconvenienced, because the CDN thinks it's dealing with bots.
| Rough stuff.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
|
| [2]: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=huqjyh7k
|
| [3]: https://privacysandbox.google.com/protections/private-
| state-...
| tim333 wrote:
| I find it a bit hard to relate to the "privacy nightmare". I've
| not worried about such things in ~27 years of using the web and
| are yet to notice ill effects from the stuff he worries about.
| I don't know if my ads are targeted because I have an ad
| blocker and don't see any. Maybe the answer to the nightmares
| in general is not to worry about stuff that doesn't affect you?
|
| Re insurers knowing you've been browsing heart disease etc, I
| have sometimes had issues like that, more you get a cheap
| initial price from an insurer/airline/car hire and then they
| jack it up when you visit again. You can sometimes do better by
| having a go from a different browser. I regard that more as me
| trying a hack to get a discounted price than a privacy
| nightmare but whatever I guess.
| pu_pe wrote:
| I don't see why banks need browser fingerprinting at all. Every
| credit card I've had in the past 10 years required two-factor
| authentication. If your theory was correct, trying to do a
| purchase in a new browser wouldn't work.
| everdrive wrote:
| Then let's get rid of the business internet. Every single thing
| I dislike about the internet is from the business internet:
| tracking, cookies, fingerprinting, SPAs, excessive javascript,
| optimizing for engagement, data brokers, I could go on.
|
| "But won't you miss XYZ?" Nope, don't care, want it gone. If
| you can't be bothered to go to the store and get it then it
| probably didn't matter very much.
| nilslindemann wrote:
| To me, it would be enough if there existed a search engine
| which only lists sites which do nothing of the above. But
| that would require that sites are honestly answering the
| question "are you tracking?". They won't. Corps have the same
| thinking as the criminals they try to keep outside.
|
| There would have to be laws which require site owners to
| answer that question honestly, so that users have a choice
| and such a search engine can be built. But states are
| interested in fingerprinting too, so I guess such will never
| happen.
| zymhan wrote:
| Those are some rose tinted glasses. Not having to drive a
| check to the city utility office to pay the power bill is
| quite the improvement.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| Based on your comment it sounds like you rarely travel
| (booking hotel / flights online), don't have mobility issues
| (ordering groceries / household essentials online), don't
| participate in online banking (do you write checks? carry
| cash with you all the time? go to an ATM weekly?), you don't
| stream movies or tv shows, and you enjoy looking for
| apartments to rent in your local newspaper listing, and you
| enjoy using paper maps when traveling around the city and
| world. I could go on...
|
| literally everything useful works on the business internet.
| Also how do you think local businesses near you operate? They
| don't call each like the 1900s lol. They order stock from
| distributors, some local and some overseas. Often they are
| doing this on the business internet. Today's global supply
| chain makes this a non-starter.
|
| It's OK if YOU personally prefer doing everything slowly and
| in person and don't value the convenience of the business
| internet. No judgment. But don't pretend this would be an
| easy transition at all. Or that most people would prefer to
| live that way.
|
| IMO it would make _way_ more sense to introduce reasonable
| privacy regulations that are better thought out than GDPR and
| have proper enforcement.
|
| Maybe a formal "community" version of the internet would be
| appropriate as well.
| everdrive wrote:
| >you rarely travel (booking hotel / flights online)
|
| Yes, and I really dislike traveling when I have to. I
| personally wish that air travel would become unaffordable
| for most people, including myself.
|
| >don't have mobility issues (ordering groceries / household
| essentials online)
|
| No, but mobility issues existed before the modern internet.
|
| >don't participate in online banking (do you write checks?
| carry cash with you all the time? go to an ATM weekly?)
|
| I do online banking, but I also write checks and use cash.
| I don't use Venmo or similar services. Once I can get ahead
| of my chores & projects I'm thinking about getting a local
| branch at a credit union and totally avoiding a banking app
| on my smart phone.
|
| >you don't stream movies or tv shows
|
| Sometimes, but I'm getting away from it. Interestingly I'm
| getting a blank screen (but there's still audio) when
| attempting to stream on Linux. I haven't fully researched
| it, but some preliminary research suggests that it's anti-
| Linux blocking. (at least one user reported the problem
| went away -- in a repeatable fashion -- when switching
| their use agent to Windows) So although this is not
| confirmed, I'm preparing for a time when this is
| unavoidable and I won't stream movies or TV whatsoever at
| that point.
|
| > and you enjoy looking for apartments to rent in your
| local newspaper listing
|
| Don't see anything wrong with this. I would actually argue
| that you don't need authentication in the way discussed in
| this conversation for this, though -- all you need is the
| listing, which can be totally anonymous. The actual
| application for the apartment can happen in person, and
| that's when verification needs to occur.
|
| >you enjoy using paper maps when traveling around the city
| and world.
|
| I use an old-fashioned GPS in my car that I paid well over
| $100 for a number of years ago. There's no tracking
| whatsoever, unlike the GPS used in a smart phone.
|
| >literally everything useful works on the business
| internet. >Also how do you think local businesses near you
| operate? They don't call each like the 1900s lol. They
| order stock from distributors, some local and some overseas
|
| Except we did fine for most of human history before all
| this. And I'm sure there were no such think as stock orders
| or warehouses or supply chains before the modern internet.
| They cropped up over night the moment the first tracking
| cookie existed. /s
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| No. Fingerprinting is a function of the ad network to identify
| ad-worth aspects of me.
|
| That some aspects may be used to push bots away is a minor
| effect.
| tzury wrote:
| I am assuming you are not in the bot mitigation business.
|
| An encrypted cookie from a company such as cloudflare
| encapsulates a multi dimensional datum such that, generating
| one in a legitimate browser, and letting a botnet using it
| will get detected and blocked.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Note that one very simple mitigation for browser fingerprinting
| is to simply run different browsers for "the business Internet"
| and "the fun Internet". You may need to do this anyway, because
| so many business sites only work on Chrome, with Javascript
| enabled, no VPN, no adblocker, and pop-ups enabled. But then
| you might use Chrome (which tracks everything you do anyway)
| for all your banking, SaaS, government tasks, so they all work,
| and then say Brave or Opera in an incognito window for all your
| fun reading. You get the adblocker, you get a different cookie
| jar for each session, you get easy access to Tor to hide your
| IP, etc.
|
| Also recommended to have a separate sandbox for "projects" -
| basically things that you do that each might require their own
| research, toolchain, files you create, etc. I'd highly
| recommend doing this in a virtual machine though - oftentimes
| you need to install apps to do your project work, and that
| presents its own attack vector. Plus if it's all in a VM you
| can just backup the VM and start fresh on new hardware without
| having to install all the dependencies, while if you're just
| saving random files and backing them up they probably won't
| work as software gets updated and dependencies get out-of-date.
| baxuz wrote:
| Not only that, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to get
| to legitimate data advanced web apps need in order to work
| properly, or to get legitimate analytics.
|
| Everything is obfuscated. And this is not the situation on iOS
| and Android.
|
| I am working on multiple products which use webassembly and
| cameras on mobile devices. It's impossible to reliably know how
| many workers to spin up, what's the safe memory limit and how
| much memory the device has, which compile-time optimized bundle
| to load, which camera to select for ideal focus lengths...
|
| Especially on iOS.
|
| And I often get customer complaints that the product is
| crashing. Eventually it ends up being a single (iPhone) that
| needs a restart to stop it from aggressively managing memory in
| Safari. Fingerprinting a device would solve SO MANY issues. And
| this is, again, possible on native apps.
| arendtio wrote:
| > Fingerprinting is often just the immune system of the
| commercial web trying to verify you are human.
|
| I don't think so.
|
| Yes, it is being used for such purposes, but the older reason
| for tracking users was the hunger of the ad networks to serve
| ads with higher impact, and I think 'personalization' is still
| the big driver here.
| flossposse wrote:
| > You cannot have a functioning "Business Internet" without
| identity verification.
|
| Yes, you can. Just like you can have a functioning grocery
| store without checking the identity of each shopper that walks
| through the door.
|
| What you cannot have is a free and democratic society or an
| efficient free market without robust protections for individual
| privacy. Privacy is the best shield the less powerful have from
| being abused and exploited by the more powerful.
|
| > We accepted the SLA for the "Business Internet" in exchange
| for free, billion-dollar tools.
|
| No, we did not accept. There was no informed consent. The full
| consequences of our use of these services was and is still is
| kept hidden from us. Tracking happens invisibly, without our
| knowledge or consent. This deprives us of the opportunity to
| express our true preference and opt out and choose an
| alternative. It's employing deception in order to subvert the
| consumer's ability to make a rational choice that represents
| their best interests.
|
| > on the modern web, anonymity looks exactly like a security
| threat
|
| An anonymous user who just uses the service normally and does
| not attempt to access sensitive information without
| authorization does not look like a security threat.
| ihucos wrote:
| yeahh. For me technically it does not make sense for "privacy
| friendly" web analytics to rely on fingerprinting techniques
| because the common sentiment seems to be that cookies are bad. At
| least cookies are easily controllable.
|
| Now shameless adverting: of course I present the solution:
| https://counter.dev
| domenicd wrote:
| As someone who used to work on Chrome, I can confirm that browser
| fingerprinting is indeed a nightmare.
|
| Back in the early days of Privacy Sandbox, before that crashed
| and burned against the UK CMA not even letting Google remove
| third-party cookie support [0], there was a lot of optimism about
| how we were going to completely solve cross-site tracking, even
| in the face of determined adversaries. This had several
| ingredients; the biggest ones I can remember are:
|
| 1. Remove third-party cookie support 2. Remove unpartitioned
| storage support 3. IP protection at scale 4. Solving
| fingerprinting
|
| In the end, well... at least we got 2, which has some security
| benefits, even if Chrome gave up on 1, 3, and 4, and thus on
| privacy. Anyway, everyone could tell that 4 was going to be the
| hardest.
|
| The closest I saw to an overarching plan was the "privacy budget"
| proposal [1], which would catalogue all the APIs that could be
| used for fingerprinting, and start breaking them (or hiding them
| behind a permission prompt, maybe?) if a site used too many of
| them in a row. I think most people were pretty skeptical of this,
| and the main person driving it moved off of Chrome in 2022.
| Mozilla has an analysis suggesting it's impractical at [2]. Some
| code seems to still exist! [3]
|
| A key prerequisite of the privacy budget proposal was trying to
| remove passive fingerprinting surfaces in favor of active ones.
| That involved removing data that is sent to the server
| automatically, or freezing APIs like `navigator.userAgent` which
| are assumed infallible, and then trying to replace them with
| flows like client hints where the server needed to request data,
| or promise-based APIs which could more clearly fail or even
| generate a permissions prompt. This was quite an uphill battle,
| as web developers (both in ad tech and outside) would fight us
| every step of the way, because it made various APIs less
| convenient. Elsewhere people have cited one example, of reducing
| Accept-Language [4]. The other big one was the user agent client
| hints headers/API [5], which generated whole new genres of trolls
| on the W3C forums.
|
| As Privacy Sandbox slumped more and more towards its current
| defeated state, people backed off from the original vision of a
| brilliant technical solution that worked even in the face of
| determined adversaries. Instead they retreated to stances like
| "if we just make it hard enough to fingerprint, it'll be obvious
| that fingerprinting scripts are doing something wrong, and we can
| block those scripts"; see e.g. [6]. Maybe that would have worked,
| I don't know, but it becomes much more of a cat-and-mouse game,
| e.g. needing to detect bundled or obfuscated scripts.
|
| And now of course it's all over; the ad tech industry, backed by
| the UK CMA, has won and forced Google to keep third-party cookies
| forever, and with those in place, there's not really any point in
| funding the anti-fingerprinting work, so it's getting wound down
| [7]. The individual engineers and teams are probably still
| passionate about launching opt-in or Incognito-only privacy
| protections, but I doubt that align with product plans. I'm sure
| Google doesn't mind the end result all that much either, as
| having to migrate the world to privacy-preserving ad tech was
| going to be a big lift. Now all that eng power can instead focus
| on AI instead of privacy.
|
| [0]: https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-next-steps/
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mikewest/privacy-budget
|
| [2]: https://mozilla.github.io/ppa-docs/privacy-budget.pdf
|
| [3]:
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/36dc3642bee...
|
| [4]: https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/reduce-accept-
| lang...
|
| [5]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/User-
| Agent_...
|
| [6]: https://privacysandbox.google.com/protections/script-
| blockin...
|
| [7]: https://privacysandbox.com/news/update-on-plans-for-
| privacy-...
| motbus3 wrote:
| Visiting a store does not give it the right for someone to stalk
| you. I don't see any reasons why (apart from the obvious $) this
| sort of business is not considered illegal. It wouldn't solve all
| the problems but would drastically reduce the incentives.
|
| I know one particular online car store that shares user data with
| insurance companies and they use that in their models to compute
| a "willingness" to pay more for insurance as well as of
| establishing the user profile. Let's say you look a sports car
| but you end up buying a family van, they charge you more for
| that.
|
| The very interesting part is that they create a "customer profile
| score" they is just a number and sell that number to other
| companies. So, by pipping your habits they aggregate data and
| technically do not violate some local laws.8
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Something missed in the continual tracking/privacy discussion is
| the primary motivations for doing so, with the assumption that
| it's about advertisers trying to sell you more stuff.
|
| I'm 100% in the need for personal privacy camp, but mention this
| only because without addressing the underlying issues, it's hard
| to come up with larger solutions.
|
| And the big issues really come down to fraud and cyber attacks:
|
| - Years ago, the NYTimes was found to be doing some kind of
| homegrown fingerprinting with canvas. They have plenty of ways of
| doing analytics and tracking subscribers, they were trying to
| root out ad fraud.
|
| - When Spotify has people every day putting up AI-generated
| streams and attempting to "listen" to them with bot networks,
| they start to look at things like fingerprinting.
|
| - Massive credential stuffing attacks on sites are often thwarted
| at the technical level by fingerprinting.
|
| - Bot traffic (and in particular AI indexing bots not respecting
| robots.txt) has shot up dramatically in the last year, and
| fingerprinting is one of the strongest ways of bot
| identification.
|
| Again, want the personal privacy, but think we need to fix the
| professional problems to get there.
| hedgeho wrote:
| I am planning to write my MSc thesis about the currently broad
| topic "Future of Open Web. Since I work at a contextual targeting
| company, I have also aggregated data about traffic to some news
| sites & contacts in the industry for interviews.
|
| Any particularly interesting angles to this that you wished there
| was research on?
| egeozcan wrote:
| I don't agree the search for a technical solution. Fingerprinting
| is not useful for the small personal website, and when it's
| useful and abused, there's a 99% chance that there's a network
| behind. You can audit and control the networks using the law. Why
| not do that?
|
| It's been obvious for a decade and a half that technical
| solutions won't be practical to implement.
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| there are a few more angles to this.
|
| Firstly, on the counter argument side, when you visit a website,
| you are using their hardware, they have every right to make any
| requirements they want to use their hardware, they are not public
| spaces.
|
| But more importantly, the fix is actually easy, use more than one
| browser, use private browsing sessions, use more than one device,
| only log in to services you dont mind tracking you, use ad
| blocking. everywhere. Dont use sites that dont behave. All things
| you should be doing anyway.
|
| However, I also think the whole concept of browser fingerprinting
| is exaggerated. None of the things that can be used for
| fingerprinting are long lived, meaning any fingerprint probably
| has a shorter life span than the average cookie, and also far
| less reliable than say an IP address, which absolutely doesnt
| personally identify you.
|
| meanwhile, it is quite rediculous to log in to all these services
| with 2FA, then expect any kind of technical or legal measure to
| prevent them from knowing exactly who you are with 100% accuracy.
|
| Mostly thinking out loud, truly anonymous browsing is a tor node
| away, but a long time since I used that, there wasn't anything
| there I was interested in after intel exchange went down.
| shevy-java wrote:
| We really need a browser (or several) that aren't effectively
| controlled by private interests (such as corporations).
|
| Basically they are used as spy-tools. Many anti-features are
| pushed into them - a simple example is the disable-right-click
| functionality. I do understand that some of this have a useful
| functionality (for instance during an exam on-campus-site, to
| restrict what the students may do), but I always hate that I need
| e. g. a browser extension just to disable this antifeature.
| That's a super-simple example; there are many more severe
| examples such as fingerprint spy-sniffing here.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| > a simple example is the disable-right-click functionality
|
| This is a part of a W3C browser spec and every web browser has
| to implement it. But you're right that people writing the spec
| work for companies selling web browsers.
| anticristi wrote:
| How about trying out legal solutions against browser
| fingerprinting? The European Data Protection Board -- i.e., the
| union of "GDPR Police" in each EU Member State -- made it clear
| the fingerprinting violates the ePrivacy Directive.
| packetslave wrote:
| I have a bit of a different take on browser fingerprinting: I
| don't want to uniquely identify you as a person so I can serve
| you ads, or whatever. I want to identify your traffic when you're
| scraping my content from 2,000 different IP's and 1,000 different
| user accounts, I can block you or rate limit you without hurting
| anyone else.
|
| Given the scale of scrapers these days (AI companies with VC
| money have no problem spinning up thousands of VMs running
| Chrome), fingerprinting at the browser level is the only
| realistic option.
|
| (obligatory: my personal opinion, not necessarily my employer's)
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