Google is allowing its advertising customers to fingerprint website visitors. Can you stop it?
  • tired_n_bored@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    14 hours ago

    After reading these reports of intensified fingerprinting I decided to block all scripts on my browser using uBlock. Can’t do much regarding the IP tho

    • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
      17·
      2 days ago

      Man, I had gaming scheduled for this weekend. I guess I gotta move up my plan to backup everything and switch over to GrapheneOS.

      • Darorad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        Its a pretty easy switch and has some nice perks like disabling the software restictions on the USB C port so you can actually hook up displays

            • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              2 days ago

              It’s possible, but a huge PITA. Learning how to do it, that is. Once you know all the magic incantations and have your potions and elixirs available, it’s easy enough.

              Most of the “how to” guides don’t mention all the little crap you need to know so it takes a lot of trolling through forums to find why this next step isn’t working.

              • krash@lemmy.mlEnglish
                1·
                1 day ago

                I have a galaxy phone but haven’t pursued the idea of installing grapheneOS on it as I thought it would be impossible. Please share you arcane knowledge of the unholy incarnations.

          • truxnell@infosec.pubEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            I’ve been daily driving bazzite for a few months, I would highly recommend you give it a distro hop for a bit to see if it fits you. The main downside is getting used to the atomic mindset and changing how you install your tooling

            • Telorand@reddthat.comEnglish
              1·
              1 day ago

              I actually have it on a laptop, because I wanted something virtually bulletproof that my SO could have that just works. No worrying about broken configs or leftover cruft.

              Just undecided if I want it on my main desktop. I’ve had a few minor but annoying issues with it, though nothing unworkable. Ricing is sometimes problematic, and that’s something I enjoy. I really like the build process, though, and how you can downstream your own version, and I like ostree backups (plus I can’t wait for bootc).

        • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          2 days ago

          gimme a decent rom guaranteed to work with my six-year-old unsupported hardware

    • _lilith@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      What service provider are you using with Graphene? I want to de google but it seems a wasted effort when I have FI

    • unhrpetby@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Last I recall, Vanadium lags behind customized-Firefox in privacy features, and even more behind the Tor Browser.

      Having a tool like Noscript is absolutely necessary, with today’s browsers, if you want to fight fingerprinting.

  • nyankas@lemmy.mlEnglish
    351·
    2 days ago

    I unfortunately can’t really see how a browser could still be nice to use and properly resist fingerprinting.

    The site https://amiunique.org/fingerprint tries to fingerprint your browser and lists the used attributes along with their uniqueness within their dataset. And while a browser could pretty reliably lie about its User Agent or Platform, it’s often just necessary for a modern website to know, for example, what your view-port’s resolution is or what kind of audio/video codecs your device supports. Going through my own results, I’d say combining these necessary data points is probably enough to identify me, even though I’m pretty privacy-conscious.

    Maybe I’m overly pessimistic, but I think preventing fingerprinting would need a regulatory instead of a technical solution. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem very likely anytime soon.

    • Nalivai@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      19 hours ago

      There are extentions for Firefox that randomise most of that. They add random supported codecs for example, enough to make it believable, not enough to make it a unique combination.
      It’s not perfect, nothing is, but it seems to be good enough.

    • Dkarma@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Browser?

      Lol they own Android…it’s the entire os. They’re fingerprinting every android phone.

    • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
      16·
      2 days ago

      I’d say combining these necessary data points is probably enough to identify me

      The EFF has had a couple of websites that would profile you on exactly this data, so you’re completely correct in that even the basic normal required metadata is more than enough to identify you pretty well.

      coveryourtracks.eff.org is where it’s living now, and a quick glance shows that just using browser capabilities and such is absolutely enough to identify me.

    • rainrain@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      23·
      2 days ago

      I’ve been using browsers for a couple of decades without digital fingerprinting and it’s nice enough for me. I see no need to make it nicer.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        Such as?

        Every browser can be fingerprinted, even Tor browser, which goes out of its way to resist fingerprinting. The only way to really avoid fingerprinting is to not use JavaScript, which is extremely limiting.

  • kbal@fedia.io
    202·
    2 days ago

    Perhaps this will motivate makers of web browsers to finally get serious about making fingerprinting less easy. Looking at you, Mozilla.

      • shininghero@pawb.socialEnglish
        86·
        2 days ago

        Yes, but with a few caveats. Last time I used the ‘Resist Fingerprinting’ option, it made window resizing funky and some sites flat out rendered wrong.
        It needs some polish and some user controls.

        • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          21·
          2 days ago

          That’s the tradeoff you have to make. Your window size is a good fingerprint, so spoofing the size makes sense. But websites that need to window size for legitimate reasons are breaking.

        • Eheran@lemmy.worldEnglish
          91·
          2 days ago

          How else could it be? The window size directly identifies you AND determines the page layout.