The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

https://kevinboone.me/fingerprinting.html

by ingve • 8 months ago

756 443 8 months ago

ArcHound3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

What’s ja3?

ArcHound3• 8 months ago

Here you go: https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additional-configurat...

It's a better explanation that I can provide.

peetistaken• 8 months ago

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

johnisgood2• 8 months ago

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?

mike_d2• 8 months ago

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

ArcHound3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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?

Xelbair2• 8 months ago

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)

sfink4• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

10 years too late.

doug_durham• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

Xelbair2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

temp0826• 8 months ago

I already pay my isp. Maybe they should work something out with them.

norman784• 8 months ago

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.

prymitive2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

echelon_musk• 8 months ago

How do you track the views?

myaccountonhn2• 8 months ago

I would. Or alternatively I'd also pay for a Spotify style model where my monthly amount get redistributed amongst the articles I read.

Terretta2• 8 months ago

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.

notatoad3• 8 months ago

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.

lanfeust6• 8 months ago

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.

imiric5• 8 months ago

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.

jcynix• 8 months ago

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.

stackghost2• 8 months ago

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.

pr3dr49• 8 months ago

Charge the provider per view. Charge the sender of that spam email per message delivered. The new internet. Would this work?

tgv• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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

kasabali• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

Vinnl2• 8 months ago

Print media did also include e.g. coupons with discount codes with which advertisers could learn which lead led through a sale.

hedora• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor was the ideal solution IMHO.

usr1106• 8 months ago

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.

txrx00002• 8 months ago

We could normalize paying content creators directly. So instead of paywalls or ads, we get "donate" buttons.

jwr2• 8 months ago

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.

Buttons8402• 8 months ago

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?

FireBeyond4• 8 months ago

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.

geocar5• 8 months ago

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

beeflet6• 8 months ago

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).

AndrewStephens4• 8 months ago

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

Neikius• 8 months ago

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.

fragmede5• 8 months ago

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.

troupo3• 8 months ago

Showing ads doesn't require invasive and pervasive 24/7 surveilance.

nativeit12• 8 months ago

Give each of them $0.25/mo, and you’ll probably 10x-100x what they’re currently getting from you watching ads.

geocar5• 8 months ago

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.

AuthAuth2• 8 months ago

I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read

Why would you assume ads are worth $5 a month? Its more like paying 10cents to read the blog.

balamatom• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

How exactly do advertisers take fingerprints and translate that to targeted ads for each user?

xnx• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Sounds like you need to switch OS

mike_d2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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_duffle2• 8 months ago

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.

armadyl2• 8 months ago

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.

ekjhgkejhgk6• 8 months ago

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.

myaccountonhn2• 8 months ago

There's the gemini protocol and gopher.

When I think of all the tracking that goes on, these are becoming more lucrative.

zzo38computer3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

All this and I still need to click on the cookie pop ups like they'll bring the cargo planes to the island.

bparsons• 8 months ago

Browser fingerprinting has been a thing since at least 2008. Kissmetrics was the first company I heard of that was doing this.

ekjhgkejhgk6• 8 months ago

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.

IshKebab3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

His stance is pretty simple. The JS on most pages is proprietary, and he doesn't like proprietary software.

bee_rider• 8 months ago

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.

ekjhgkejhgk6• 8 months ago

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

StillBored• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

A browser basically is like a really dumb trojan, pulling a whole herd of wooden horses into the city.

codedokode7• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

beeflet6• 8 months ago

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.

gruez6• 8 months ago

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.

boxedemp2• 8 months ago

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.

ekjhgkejhgk6• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

I’m curious if there is a product like cloudflare’s remote browser isolation that obfuscates it in that way.

tetha3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

An answer usually contains more information than just that one bit.

Isn't the point to ask yes or no questions?

tetha3• 8 months ago

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.

emil-lp• 8 months ago

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.

zie2• 8 months ago

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-...

georgefrowny2• 8 months ago

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.

tetha3• 8 months ago

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.

btilly4• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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

btilly4• 8 months ago

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-834• 8 months ago

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.

btilly4• 8 months ago

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.

canyp• 8 months ago

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.

drnick14• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Orion Browser (Kagi Product) prevents fingerprinters from running by default.

https://help.kagi.com/orion/privacy-and-security/preventing-...

codedokode7• 8 months ago

How do they reliably detect fingerprinting? Did they solve the Halting Problem? Sounds fishy.

ashman5• 8 months ago

Orion browser is also capable of running uBlock Origin (not Lite) on iOS.

mmooss3• 8 months ago

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?)

codedokode7• 8 months ago

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.

drnick14• 8 months ago

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.

dminuoso2• 8 months ago

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?

kachapopopow• 8 months ago

All javascript based anti-fingerprinting is detectable and is also a major source of uniqueness!

vorticalbox• 8 months ago

Sure but if you are always unique for every website then you can’t be tracked overtime.

maks198• 8 months ago

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)

ykonstant2• 8 months ago

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.

Lio• 8 months ago

Why shouldn’t you care and how is the issue with fingerprinting overblown?

0xy2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

pteraspidomorph• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

"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.

capitainenemo6• 8 months ago

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.

drnick14• 8 months ago

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.

samtheprogram• 8 months ago

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.

cortesoft2• 8 months ago

Basically the XKCD license plate comic: https://xkcd.com/1105/

zelphirkalt3• 8 months ago

You can and should be using a good VPN to make the masked fingerprint and IP address non-unique.

thrw888• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

"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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Privacy tax, sigh

mmooss3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Firefox already provides this feature in about:config using resist fingerprint - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting

soulofmischief• 8 months ago

You could just use `privacy.resistFingerprinting` in Firefox, tweak a few other settings, install uBlock Origin/uMatrix and you get the same thing, unless I'm missing something?

udev4096• 8 months ago

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_• 8 months ago

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.

armadyl2• 8 months ago

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.

mixmastamyk2• 8 months ago

We’re working on a comprehensive solution here (and could use your help), the Ethical Computing Initiative.

https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/

gweinberg2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

gruez6• 8 months ago

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.

NewsaHackO2• 8 months ago

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.

nativeit12• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

lipbetfox2• 8 months ago

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_c2• 8 months ago

How to scream I'm behaving badly online...

nativeit12• 8 months ago

How to scream, “I’m living a life of unalloyed privilege.”

mixmastamyk2• 8 months ago

Isn't the semi-recent per-site cookie jar most of this functionality?

boxedemp2• 8 months ago

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?

arbol7• 8 months ago

Do you have a repo for this?

lipbetfox2• 8 months ago

Just use any Firefox browser (I prefer Floorp) with the Temporary Container Plus extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...) and set automatic mode on.

baalimago• 8 months ago

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.

arbol7• 8 months ago

Its efficient until you get bots that rotate fingerprints with every request. Then you need to move to behavioural metrics to see if they look different to regular users of the site.

stego-tech2• 8 months ago

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.

gruez6• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

...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-tech2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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).

mlhpdx4• 8 months ago

Don’t confuse privacy with anonymity. One is a right in the US, the other is not.

Rygian• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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

mlhpdx4• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

mlhpdx4• 8 months ago

But privacy in public in general isn’t a thing, right?

neilv• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Paypal does what? I'm sometimes nervous I only need 2 factors of authentication. 0FA seems dangerous for financial anything.

slig• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

The article is missing links to one of the first fingerprint diagnostic tools, https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ , formerly called something like panopticon.net.

TechDebtDevin• 8 months ago

or don't trust the EFF!

nativeit12• 8 months ago

Beyond the notion that no org should be trusted implicitly, why would the EFF specifically be untrustworthy?

skaul• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

its consistent cross site, so you get all the same privacy problems as with 3rd party cookies

zkmon• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

fsflover3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

uBlock origin just got replaced with uBlock lite for most people

autoexec2• 8 months ago

Most people using chrome are also using Google's DNS servers too which hands them a list of every single domain you visit.

scrollop• 8 months ago

PSA Don't use chrome.

SV_BubbleTime5• 8 months ago

Definitely a good STEP1, but it’s not like Firefox and Safari are finger printing secure.

datavirtue2• 8 months ago

I only use it when I want to be tracked.

FridayoLeary• 8 months ago

That will just make you stand out more.

nikcub• 8 months ago

don't use the same browser regardless - the key is to compartmentalise.

faidit2• 8 months ago

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.

unethical_ban• 8 months ago

PSA only use Mullvad or Tails which are set up to be as bland and uniform as possible

datavirtue2• 8 months ago

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.

thaumasiotes6• 8 months ago

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.

jm44• 8 months ago

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.

Juliate4• 8 months ago

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?

biztos2• 8 months ago

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?

RamRodification2• 8 months ago

$lang_header = $lang_header + $the_lang_choice_that_was_just_made

zzo38computer3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

arbol7• 8 months ago

No JS fingerprint - your browser version and IP are still visible.

baq• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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_• 8 months ago

https://xkcd.com/1105/

rncode• 8 months ago

you're all running chrome signed into google with 47 extensions and complaining about privacy. the call is coming from inside the house

nobody422• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

nobody422• 8 months ago

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/

coppsilgold• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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

notepad0x902• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

notepad0x902• 8 months ago

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_mann2• 8 months ago

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?

nativeit12• 8 months ago

Most privacy-thumping browsers do this, to some degree, but it’s not a panacea. The article gets into it.

t_mann2• 8 months ago

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.

arbol7• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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-hn3• 8 months ago

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?

dempedempe2• 8 months ago

Yeah. You are fingerprinted if you disable JS and/or use a VPN. Read the article for more info.

ifh-hn3• 8 months ago

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...

diogenes_atx• 8 months ago

Useful site to see what info your browser is giving out:

https://amiunique.org/

xp842• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

nativeit12• 8 months ago

Is this before or after ICE became a $150B secret paramilitary beholden to a corrupt authoritarian with a large cohort of sycophantic tech billionaires?

xp842• 8 months ago

I’m not an illegal immigrant so I’m not worried about it

dartharva• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

We can start by getting rid of (freezing) the User-Agent header. No need to make it easy.

kuon2• 8 months ago

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?

reincoder2• 8 months ago

I work for IPinfo. If you're on a residential connection, the geolocation of that IP address is likely to be accurate up to the ZIP code area. We have generalized hints of location information from over 70 different sources. Then we aggregate them and we map this information based on population density in the geographic region. Sure, our data is becoming more granular, but it's not granular enough to detect individual houses from residential connections.

However, our data is improving for POI (Points of Interest). For example, with data centers, we're working on identifying the exact data center from IP addresses. Similar accuracy applies to airports, hotels, and conference halls, as they tend to have a large concentration of IP addresses in a very small area.

We do publish a lot of information on our research page: https://ipinfo.io/data-research

kuon2• 8 months ago

I have my own IP range and the data is accurate to the meter, which is what worries me.

gausswho• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

Isn't it forbidden on the EU anyways - thanks to GDPR?

arbol7• 8 months ago

Somewhat. Opt-in is required for marketing purposes. Fingerprinting counts as PII due to its potential to personally identify an individual. Other legitimate uses, such as fraud detection, do not require opt-in.

metek• 8 months ago

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.

uoaei2• 8 months ago

It's moderately inconvenient to

uoaei2• 8 months ago

oops!

tzury2• 8 months ago

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.

domenicd2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

TurboSkyline• 8 months ago

I also think about this sometimes. On the one hand, I have a natural instinct to give away as little personal data as I can, and it intuitively makes sense to me that it’s in your favour to keep as much private as possible; I assume many of us here feel the same way. But on the other hand, it takes a lot of energy to keep track of all the data that you leak, and often you have to give up better tools or workflows for a small perceived privacy gain.

Does this matter? Even if I do everything “right”, nobody around me does it. I can try to keep my shopping preferences and my searches private, but there is so much to gather from everyone else who doesn’t care about this that my efforts are very likely in vain. Even without my cookies, if you have as much data as a big tracker does, you can definitely make pretty good assumptions about what I like.

The response I usually see to this is that if everybody cared about privacy, then the picture would be different. But I’ve been reading exactly the same argument about using Firefox for the last ~15 years, and look where the Firefox share of the market is now…

anon7000• 8 months ago

It’s less about targeted ads and more about how little right you have to your own information. Politically, you really should care that you have a right to your own data! Everyone generates so much data through their online activity, and privacy policies everyone agrees to allow your data to be collated, sold, and analyzed really without your knowledge or true consent. While it might not have a negative impact to you today, there are more and more compelling business incentives for companies to turn your data against you.

For example, did you know your car manufacturer sold information about their customers to data brokers? Which then combined that data with anything else they can buy and get their hands on to calculate a “risk score?” Which then gets sold to car insurance companies, which increases your insurance rate? https://youtu.be/X6UW4CFz71s

This kind of BS is why we all need to care and assert our right to privacy. Companies don’t have a right to your data, but aren’t forced to do informed consent, and somehow data brokers are legal. Why is my data being sold without my informed consent?

pu_pe• 8 months ago

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.

everdrive3• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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_swe2• 8 months ago

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.

johannes1234321• 8 months ago

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.

tzury2• 8 months ago

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.

nostrademons2• 8 months ago

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.

flossposse4• 8 months ago

I don't think separate browsers is a very effective mitigation. If both browsers are running on the same machine, from the same ip address, using the same email address for logins, the same phone number for 2FA, it will be pretty clear that both browsers represent the same person. Even cross-device identity tracking is a real thing.

baxuz2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

flossposse4• 8 months ago

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.

overflow8972• 8 months ago

Most grocery stores in every place I have lived have security cameras so that if you did something illegal you'd be identified very quickly. At this point this is even true of small bodegas.

Also scammers can't waltz into my grocery store from the other side of the planet and wreak havoc.

Ultimately you can use privacy enhancing tools, just like servers can choose to block them. I wish there was a better system but that's what we've got.

ihucos• 8 months ago

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

domenicd2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

rglynn• 8 months ago

I have little sympathy for the ad business failing to properly track ad fraud. I don't think the world is fundamentally better off for advertising.

On the bot traffic, do we not have better ways to do this that don't involve violating privacy of free human beings?

Proof-of-work captchas provide minor friction to an end-user but massively restrict the types of high-volume + low-compute attacks that would be doing this. That's just one example, I'm sure there are other ways too.

hedgeho• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

godshatter2• 8 months ago

Every browser has to implement it but there's nothing saying they can't let the user disable that functionality, either.

anticristi• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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)

The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting

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