A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

by mwheelz • 3 months ago

625 294 3 months ago

superkuh• 3 months ago

With javascript off it just stalls at "reading" forever. There are certainly some viewport properties and other things it does know even without JS execution, but the mitigation is significant. And the page itself (the JS application) cannot act on that data or communicate it. Instead it has to be processed by some other application on the backend or wherever. Not in my browser by my computer.

Steve16384• 3 months ago

I can't help feeling that if you're turning JS off, you might as well turn off your computer to protect your data.

andai• 3 months ago

Nah, HTTP logs still leak my circadian rhythm.

MarkusQ• 3 months ago

That's actually a fantastic idea!

Oh wait, no, I'm an e-addict. Drat! Curse this monkey!

dylan6045• 3 months ago

As an experiment, I made a small retail shop (< 30 products) that would use JS for modern style async/await calls, but would then use old school POSTs if JS was disabled with full page reloads on every POST. it sucked to dev and as UX, but it was possible to do. Had the non-JS POST style updates been any less annoying, it might have been viable. Nobody likes full reloads. They suck. JS can do nice things for UX. It's just that we can't have nice things because people suck

MarsIronPI• 3 months ago

This site actually works just fine without JS.

mrpopo• 3 months ago

Happy to say that my browser didn't tell anything that I didn't expect it to. It even identified my IP from a location 1000km away from me.

Firefox on Android with ublock

wincy• 3 months ago

My battery is at NaN%, the site is cool but it should probably change the text if I’m not actually exposing that information.

It got the city wrong but close to where I live. This stuff would be wildly wrong if I fired up my VPN. Although its annoying when I connected to a VPN to Steam it’ll often show my prices in Canadian dollars instead of USD.

freedomben2• 3 months ago

Heh, my battery (which I don't have cause this is a desktop) is at 100% apparently

dylan6045• 3 months ago

Battery: kept back Your browser kept your battery level back. Firefox removed this API entirely in 2016, after researchers proved it could be used to track a visitor across websites without cookies, without consent. The API still exists in the specification. It was simply hidden — from you, and from any page that might ask after it.

Well, at least something positive from the shit I take for not sheepling my way through life using Chrome

Multicomp• 3 months ago

Mine told me my graphics card was "or similar" so my stock Firefox is doing at least okay.

While I still follow the general privacy first tenets, I have ended up backing off on some tools (noscript and librewolf) at the extremes of privacy because if every site is going to track everything by my IP or by my ASN or browser fingerprint, I do have a happy medium of being private enough while not being utterly broken in my browsing.

Roughly that looks like email aliases on demand via sieve rules, ublock origin with liberal use of filter lists, different handles and a password manager, frozen credit ratings, and Tailscale exit nodes or Mozilla(Mullvad) VPN for uncontrolled WiFi access points for my jnrootabke android device and mostly signal for comms.

I'm getting to old to be a privacy extreme enthusiast when all of my family side channels everything straight to Facebook, so this is the impure level of privacy I can sustain.

Milpotel• 3 months ago

Same for me, also the "screen" size is off (just shows window size), the location is off by hundreds of kilometres and other information is quite generic (battery level "kept back", small set of standard fonts available...).

freedomben2• 3 months ago

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it gives my exact GPU, but that was surprising to me. Just so everyone knows, its an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT and I paid way too much for it during the covid/crypto price explosion when they were sold out everywhere. Still a bit raw about that, but it is an excellent card on Linux (fedora)

scragz• 3 months ago

you are using a Radeon RX 6900 XT on Fedora Linux. we know this because you admitted it in the previous comment.

ape4• 3 months ago

Yeah the exact kind shouldn't matter - just the WebGL capabilities.

dylan6045• 3 months ago

"Your graphics processor identified itself as or similar"

guess mine isn't such a specific model as yours. so I don't have a real GPU, i have something similar to a GPU??? did I get a knock off Alibaba version?

stusmall• 3 months ago

I got "or similar" from Firefox and exact make and model from chrome. Probably a browser issue and not a hardware issue.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

Real bug. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" for the renderer string and my parser was grabbing the second half. Fixed; pushing in a minute. Your GPU is fine. Your browser is doing the right thing.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

The GPU string really is the spicy one combined with screen + fonts it's enough to single you out across most of the open web. The card itself is a tank.

2ndorderthought• 3 months ago

Yea that is a strong fingerprint. Especially if any of the other things were correct or someone has a way to model your behaviors. How long you scroll vs how often you type etc. and somehow that's still not enough for big tech and they need biometrics, photo IDs, etc.

tgv• 3 months ago

It got mine quite wrong (Firefox).

The thing that bothered me is that browser are still sending the Referer info. I thought that was not supposed to work under https?

aidanbeck• 3 months ago

Aside from the fingerprinting methods, the graphics processor string seems to be the most immediately personal data given up (other than location, which was incorrect for me). I could see sites tailoring ads around an assumed class, income, and level of digital literacy based on this data point alone.

chrisweekly• 3 months ago

I appreciate the intent here, so this is constructive feedback:

  - Some of the numbers are off, eg

"Your browser allocated 39322 MB of storage to this page alone"

  - low contrast in dark mode makes text hard to read

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

The 39 GB number is a bug. I was reading quota (browser allow-up-to ceiling) and calling it "allocated." Fixed; pushing now. Contrast is intentional but I hear you. not changing it but noted, and a cleaner reading mode is on the to-do later.

topham2• 3 months ago

Contrast is a violation of accessibility guidelines.

yakkomajuri• 3 months ago

DuckDuckGo browser helped mask some stuff, but definitely a fair amount still goes through.

Annoyingly the web is becoming a bit more annoying to browse as a DuckDuckGo (mobile) and Brave (desktop) user. With a VPN on top it gets even worse.

Gualdrapo• 3 months ago

Text is so dim is really hard to read.

O1111OOO• 3 months ago

If you're on FF, this could be helpful for these kinds of sites (I use it all the time):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/site-color-ch...

ebolyen• 3 months ago

There's really a lot more you can look at here. Lot's a prior art on super-cookies and fingerprinting:

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

https://amiunique.org/

cf100clunk2• 3 months ago

Another info leakage feedback tool:

https://www.ipleak.com/full-report/

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

Both linked in the Sources & Confessions modal at the bottom. Cover Your Tracks is the spiritual ancestor of this whole piece. amiunique is more rigorous; this is the editorial cousin.

cf100clunk2• 3 months ago

Brutally dark site doesn't seem to show much to my eyes. No modal appearing at the bottom.

nottorp3• 3 months ago

Hmm interesting. I tried the EFF site and among other things it told me I'm on "MacIntel".

Gave me a scare, thought I'm still somehow running an x86 build of Firefox.

card_zero• 3 months ago

* I'm not in that city.

* It's running a kind of Chrome on a kind of Linux, at a stretch.

* Nobody can infer when I work and when I sleep. That includes me.

* The recent, high-end display is the screen of a low-end tablet I bought in a supermarket five years ago.

* But yes, browser fingerprinting is annoying.

* Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?

delichon• 3 months ago

It was much better for me.

* Your socks don't match anything in the room.

* The man you thought you killed in Tuscaloosa woke up and walked home an hour later and is now a chiropractor in Shreveport.

* Your daughter is pregnant by the kid who trims the hedges.

* Your dog is dreaming about the squirrel in the wood pile.

How does it know?

vitorfblima• 3 months ago

This is all common knowledge, unfortunately.

BugsJustFindMe• 3 months ago

* That's the wrong battery percentage and the wrong charging status.

Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?

It would probably still be low contrast garbage even if it did. :/

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

The 100% charging readout is the desktop-with-no-battery phantom. I pushed a stricter filter for that earlier, you may be on a cached copy (try a hard refresh). On the light-mode call: the page detects your preference but doesn't honor it, intentionally. The irony being that the demo ignores the same signal it points out. I take the cost of the annoyance.

mystraline• 3 months ago

It would probably still be low contrast garbage even if it did. :/

My guess this is LLM slop website generation. And they forgot to prompt to include high contrast text... And the site owner cant make the changes without a sloperator.

cush• 3 months ago

The amount of fingerprinting this page reveals pales in comparison to what actually happens in the wild

jwally2• 3 months ago

its ease is also vastly inflated. If it was as simple as this site makes it out to be, companies like fingerprint.com don't exist.

georgemcbay• 3 months ago

I'm not in that city.

Same, it said Riverside but I'm in San Diego (about 100 miles away from Riverside).

Of course, its just using a geolocation database for the IP address and thus reporting the location of some switching center Verizon runs and not my actual location.

If you're trying to prove a point about privacy its probably best not to lead off with information that can be off by hundreds of miles while presenting the fact that it "knows" this information as being darkly ominous.

Presenting this information while being wrong probably does the opposite of the site's intent and gives some people a false sense of security because what real websites and apps track about you using digital fingerprinting is a lot more detailed, personalized and (usually) correct than what this website presents.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

This is a real version of the critique and I've been thinking about it. The page leans on an IP-to-geo lookup that's known to be approximate (city-level on a good day, region-level often, wrong-city sometimes); accuracy isn't the point, any location, given without asking, is the point. But you're right that leading with a wrong answer gives readers permission to dismiss the whole. Considering opening with timezone instead and demoting geo to later, where it lands as "we tried, here's how close we got." Open to better suggestions.

cobbaut• 3 months ago

I'm not in that city.

Same, it claims Brussels, but I'm in Antwerp. It also got my screen resolution wrong.

quietsegfault2• 3 months ago

Nobody can infer when I work and when I sleep. That includes me.

Are you like /severed/ or something? Surely you can infer when you work and sleep from your experience living your life as you.

sgbeal2• 3 months ago

Surely you can infer when you work and sleep from your experience living your life as you.

Not everybody has a schedule. Mine is essentially "eat when hungry, sleep when tired", and my sleep patterns more closely follow a 26-hour day than a 24-hour day.

nozzlegear3• 3 months ago

I'm not in that city.

I'm using Apple's Private Relay VPN so it was hundreds of miles off. It's always interesting to see where websites or services think I'm located using their geolocation databases, but if I turn it off they can pinpoint me within a couple of miles. Thankfully almost nobody has ever blocked Apple's VPN, so I never have to turn it off.

Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?

Seriously, I'm in my mid-30s but some of these dark mode sites make me feel mid-80s. I can't see shit on this site.

EchoReflection• 3 months ago

yeah it told me I'm "in Los Angeles" but that's just the time zone I'm in. It also "thinks" that because I have two different languages as inputs that it has scored some kind of "gotcha", but I just happen to also frequently use a second language .

"English · Chinese Your browser’s primary language is English. It also carries Chinese. This tells us not just what language you speak, but often where you were raised, where you have lived, or who you live with. This is transmitted in the header of every HTTP request. It has been doing this for as long as you have used this browser."

No, the fact that I have English and Chinese as input languages does not tell it "where I was raised, where I have lived, or who I have lived with.". Might as well say "the fact that you're using a phone to look at the Internet tells reveals that you are someone who can access a phone to look at the Internet!". Yes, technologies interact with other technologies. That's how "technologies" work. Is it Orwellian? Yes. But is it more Orwellian than the surveillance states of Russia/China/North Korea. etc? We also can now find our phones/cars/devices that can share location, locate criminals by way of their online activity, record incidents that"need" to be recorded (like when ppl are committing crimes or when police officers need to be held accountable for their behavior). Catastrophizing about the "overreach" of tech is a cognitive choice. That all being said, it is good to be aware of what info our technologies "know" about us.

econ• 2 months ago

We will show you the Chinese LA. adds anyway just to be sure.

account42• 2 months ago

* Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?

The problem is that "light mode" tends to be the default when there has actually not been a user preference made. In Firefox with tracking protection its even sent when enhanced tracking protection is enabled instead of doing the sensible thing and indicating no preference.

ramon156• 3 months ago

Its mixing confidential info. For example, you know I'm connected from a location, but you do not know my precise location. I connected from a tower that is from Odido, but I am not paying Odido for a subscription.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

Right, IP-to-geo is approximate and gets a lot of cases wrong (yours among them). Most ad networks use it as a region/DMA hint, and not precise positioning. The point of including it isn't precision. It's that any location is more than nothing, and the visitor never opted in.

thatguy0900• 3 months ago

Man what a awful looking site. I shouldn't have to crank my brightness to max to kind of read the words

fodkodrasz• 3 months ago

I agree, this site is an eyesore.

I use windows color filters (Grayscale inverted is my preferred, in the past I used plain inverted) for poor man's dark mode (or light mode in this case) for stuff that doesn't honor my color scheme and hurts my eyes. It also has a hotkey, so it is really handy sometimes, but you need to enable it in the settings.

Assistive technologies are great, not only because they benefit those who have no choice but to rely on them, but also they can benefit the luckier people.

aziaziazi• 3 months ago

Your screen is 320 by 568 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display.

It’s been a long time my 2016’ iPhone as been called recent or high-end but I’ll take the compliment, thank-you.

chainingsolid2• 3 months ago

Ya, I'm not running my Pinephone's display at x2 cause its a high end display on a $200 phone.....

crazygringo2• 3 months ago

This is just... silly. Everything it told me, while browsing on my iPhone, seems entirely reasonable.

Every page you have ever visited knows at least this much. Most of them know more. None of them told you.

So? Why would I want the news site I'm visiting to "tell me" it knows my preferred language, that I'm using light mode, or the estimated location of my IP address...?

It's not surprising that a browser which renders text can be used to identify which fonts are available. It's not surprising that a browser which allows calculation with your GPU will identify your type of GPU.

The "without asking" framing is just silly. I expect to be asked for consent to use my webcam or microphone or exact precise location. But the last thing I want is to be asked for permission around detecting my local time zone or preferred language or my screen resolution or 20 other totally reasonable things for a website to be able to know.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

Right that most of these aren't surprises individually, and right that nobody wants a permission prompt for Accept-Language. The argument isn't that you should, it's that the combination is enough to identify you across sites without your awareness, and that the wider tracking ecosystem trades on that bundle. The piece is editorial about the thing existing, not a proposal to gate every header. Reasonable to push back if you find the bundle isn't the point.

crazygringo2• 3 months ago

Fingerprinting has exited for a long time. But this site is specifically saying "None of them told you".

The site does seem to be implying that disclosure and consent are the issues:

We did not ask for your location.
Nothing about this was requested. The information arrived on its own.
Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection. It will do this again on the next page you visit, and the one after that.
No permission is required.

It's framing this as if browsers are maliciously volunteering information that ought to be protected, and that sites are maliciously hiding the information available to them.

It does seem to be clearly suggesting that even basic pieces of information ought to be available only upon request and that this must be disclosed to users.

You say this is "not a proposal to gate every header", but it's sure looking like something close to that to me.

Retr0id2• 3 months ago

Your screen is 1512 by 982 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display. Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection.

No it didn't. It was queried by the JS running on the page. It's a fun demo but it could really do without the slop prose.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

Pedantic but right. The JS queries them; the browser returns them without prompting the user. "Volunteered" is the editorial verb for that round-trip but it does paper over a layer.

Retr0id2• 3 months ago

It's relevant because connection-level fingerprinting is directly visible to intermediaries like cloudflare.

pixel_popping6• 3 months ago

Yeah, no need JS to track resolution or even mouse movements with timing, pure HTML/CSS can do.

troyvit• 3 months ago

Your graphics processor identified itself as or similar.

That checks out. I think what I have is similar to a graphics card but isn't quite.

wlesieutre2• 3 months ago

My GPU identification is off by about a decade but it did get the brand right

Sohcahtoa82• 3 months ago

Seriously. My laptop was manufactured last year, and the site identified it as a Radeon R9 200 series. That was a top-of-the-line GPU...back in 2014.

pona-a• 3 months ago

A vibe-coded EFF Cover Your Tracks. The fact this made it to front-page is spookier than its contents

camillomiller4• 3 months ago

Yes! By a user who’s 21 days old, has never commented and it’s not even following this thread as he has absolutely never replied and never will. Having these kind of submissions not flagged is killing hacker news

EricBetts• 3 months ago

I think at least they're following the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064959

serial_dev• 3 months ago

I disagree, the discussion is still interesting to me. The page might be low quality AI slop (though it claims it’s not), I did find the discussion about it informative to a degree.

moritzwarhier2• 3 months ago

exactly, it even looks like a page created by someone asked to "replicate this, non-obviously, add fancy landing page theme".

Fugly.

joshstrange• 3 months ago

It's somewhat interesting but over half of what it talked about is just silly.

- Reverse IP/geocode (while be cute about "we won't show your IP", oh no, not my IP!)

- Timezone - Ok, yeah, lots of websites need/make use of that for completely legit tasks

- Browser/OS/Screen size - boring, again mostly needed or historical

- GPU - Again, not super interesting IMHO

- Battery - Ok, this is the first one I think should be behind a permission dialog

- Language - Come off it, that's just table stakes

- Fonts - Again, not sure how else this should work in a "perfect" world

- Cookies/dark mode/DnT/etc - Ehh, again aside from fingerprinting (which ruins everything) these are all QoL improvements IMHO

- Referrer - Again, this is just how the web works

I think the websites that take all of that and show you a fingerprint or show the data in a more data-oriented way are way more compelling.

This, almost certainly vibe-coded, website doesn't do anything novel and hits on a huge pet peeve of mine: using low-quality arguments for a legit issue (fingerprinting). By mixing in stuff like your IP/Language on the same level as Battery/GPU/other-fingerprinty-things it makes the whole argument less compelling.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

Fair pushback, and partially right. Most of these data points are individually defensible. Accept-Language helps with localization, Referer is just how links work, timezone is universally useful. The page's argument isn't that any single one is bad; it's that the bundle is identifying. Panopticlick / Cover Your Tracks measures combinatorial uniqueness, not any single point. The piece could be sharper about the distinction. Noted.

thesuitonym• 3 months ago

I'm with you on almost all of this, but since you (almost) asked, here's how I think fonts should work:

The server tells your browser to display a line of text in a specific font. If that font is available, your browser does so, and if not, it displays the text in your default font, or a backup font if the developer specified one. There's no need for the server to know if it's there or not.

Sophira• 2 months ago

That's essentially how things used to work, and the problem is that it too can be gamed using JavaScript. For example, a relatively naive approach might be:

1. Make an HTML <span> element that contains "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" written in the default font.

2. You can't query what font that was, but you can use the getComputedStyle() DOM function of that element to work out the width (for example) of the resulting element. Note this down.

3. Do the same for all the different fonts that you want to test.

4. If any element's width differs from the default's noted in step 2, then the corresponding font is guaranteed to be installed on your system.

As written, this won't detect the font that the user has selected to be the default font (because it won't detect the width as being different). However, you can work around this (and remove most false negatives to boot) by a simple addition:

5. Pick one of the fonts that you detected as being installed.

6. Create more elements (as in step 1) that correspond to all the fonts that were detected as being the same width as the default, but have the font you selected in step 5 as a fallback. (eg. 'font-family: Testing, Fallback;')

7. Any element with a width that differs from the font you selected in step 5 is installed on the system.

What you get will be a relatively complete list of what fonts are on the system out of the ones you tested. If you want more accuracy, you can do a similar thing with individual letters instead.

akersten• 3 months ago

People discovering "just how the web works" have spawned myriad complaints, misguided laws, and general anger and confusion. I wish there was a test people had to take before they go online or something. Otherwise they'll still be mad that Chrome Incognito didn't prevent ads.google.com from registering them as a pageview statistic.

nathanmills• 3 months ago

You can't gaurentee any of this is fingerprintable without checking twice (i.e. give the user a unique url, then ask them to restart the browser and visit it). In privacy browsers like LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser this is almost all spoofed, save for things like the IP which needs to be hidden/changed independently of the browser.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

Correct on rigor. Proving a fingerprint requires the two-visit protocol you describe. The page doesn't actually compute a stable fingerprint or attempt to track returning visitors, it shows you the signals that go into one. The barcode at the bottom is deterministic from the data shown but isn't compared against anything stored. Sloppier than a real fingerprinting tool, by design.

romanows• 3 months ago

Lol, the description text is so dramatic.

carimura• 3 months ago

Aren't LLMs smart enough to choose better color contrast by now?

nosioptar• 3 months ago

Not when they've been trained on low contrast garbage.

IdiotSavage2• 3 months ago

Where you were before
news.ycombinator.com

This has always bothered me the most. I disabled the 'Referer' header once, but it breaks many websites.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

The Referer header is the one that's hardest to opt out of cleanly, strip it at the network level and too many things break. Referrer-Policy lets the origin set the rule, but the visitor doesn't get to choose. There's a quiet move toward Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin as a sane default in modern browsers but it's still origin-dictated, not visitor-dictated.

pessimizer• 3 months ago

I strip/forge it with a old, probably outdated firefox extension (Referer Control.) But you still got news.ycombinator.com. How? I thought the extension was broken, but it's not.

That was actually my only surprise, everything else I was expecting.

edit: ignore this, looks like I just needed to save my preferences again. Thanks for showing me that I have been leaking my referer for some mysterious amount of time.

exe34• 3 months ago

Hah I remember the picture of the scrotum.

al_borland2• 3 months ago

It's interesting that this breaks things. When trying to link to an internal password vault at work it would always break. People would have to click the link on my site, then reload it to get the page to load. This wan an issue for years, across multiple versions and despite many people offering up ideas to help solve it. One day I thought maybe it was a referrer issue, so I had it open with noopener,noreferrer, and that fix it.

It seems odd that any site would require a user come from somewhere.

IdiotSavage2• 2 months ago

I just found a new(?) setting in Firefox, to spoof the Referer header, instead of omitting it. Will try that for a while and see how it works.

  about:config -> network.http.referer.spoofSource

lucideer• 3 months ago

The website is pretty & the overdramatic copy is fun, but there's much better fingerprinting demos out there.

The number of data points shown here is low - there's plenty more it could be checking - & a good number of them seem to be wrong (it's only detecting one as explicitly "withheld" but I believe a few of them actually are, leading to garbled output).

Needs some QA.

InsideOutSanta• 3 months ago

The overdramatic tone is pretty funny. "You are in [wrong city]. We could send a team on ninjas to kill you right now, but we chose not to. You are welcome."

acid__• 3 months ago

In short, another AI-generated slop project.

I've seen this exact UI style a dozen times now and it's always accompanied with tell-tale overly verbose, overly dramatic text.

rappatic• 3 months ago

Vibecoded slop with LLM-written copy. When will it stop

efilife4• 3 months ago

We desperately need some tagging system/convention here. Maybe just putting [AI] into the title. This bullshit is getting really tiring.

It looks like this is an ad by the way, check op's posting history

camillomiller4• 3 months ago

All these submissions come from bots, and users with accounts younger than a month with one single submission (in this case three times the same submission). Maybe the system should block anyone with lower than xyz points and 20 comments to post any link? I dunno, I guess it's hard but this shit is really affecting the community.

none_to_remain• 3 months ago

According to the "Sources" popup, creator can't even excuse the slop as AI slop:

The prose
Hand-written · Template-based, not generative
Every sentence on this page was written by Matt. The code selects among prose templates based on what your browser returned. No language model writes or rewrites anything at runtime. If a condition is not covered by hand-written prose, the page stays quiet about it — we'd rather say less than say something false.

sgarrity• 3 months ago

I'm not worried about my privacy. No one can read the dark text on that page anyhow.

efilife4• 3 months ago

We've seen tens of pages like this, all done better. Now the vibe coders got into it and completely fuck up the idea.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

Update: I pushed two rounds of fixes for things people caught.

1. GPU "or similar" stranded prose. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" as the masked renderer string and my parser was grabbing the second half. Masked-GPU case now gets its own observation.

2. Desktop battery showing NaN/100%. Chromium reports a phantom 100%-charging battery on machines without one; my filter was too narrow. Stricter check, falls through to "kept back."

3. Storage quota of 39+ GB reading as implausible. Now expressed in GB, and the prose was reworded ("would let this page write up to" rather than "allocated to").

4. Screen size matching window size (Firefox letterboxing / Brave farbling). Page now names it: "your browser appears to be returning the viewport in place of the real screen — anti-fingerprinting at work."

5. "Recent, high-end display" being claimed on old retina devices (iPhone 5-class). Tightened the heuristic.

6. No-JS hangs at "reading." <noscript> block added.

Worth saying directly since it came up. The prose is hand-written. Each observation has a small set of templated registers and the code selects among them based on what the data returns. There is no LLM in the runtime path. AI helped me iterate on the spec like it does for most projects now. The sentences on the page are mine. If that's not the kind of work you're in the mood for, fair, but the slop charge is wrong.

pixel_popping6• 3 months ago

But why don't you show real tracking capabilities? Not what's accessible via the browser directly and legally :/

culi• 3 months ago

Most of this is pretty standard stuff but one thing I did learn is some of the fingerprinting techniques I wouldn't've thought of. Like Mozilla/Apple not sharing GPU or battery information being used to confirm which browser I use even if I fake the User Agent String.

Cider99864• 3 months ago

I prefer https://fingerprint.com/demo

Terrible company-at least you know you are testing what is being used.

pixel_popping6• 3 months ago

What's terrible about them?

Cider99864• 3 months ago

They track us around the web.

corobo• 3 months ago

Dunno what it is with the wording but my brain started reading it in a bit of a "Hello Clarice" Hannibal Lecter style lol

The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique — like a fingerprint made of letters

Is this one true? I've not made any changes to fonts on my phone that I know of, wouldn't it just be bog standard iPhone fonts?

Curiosity not challenge

Would be cool if you actually did track just to prove the point like "you've opened this page 6 times now, 2 of those were via VPN and one time was using the Firefox Focus browser. Have you found any flaws in the data yet?"

tempodox• 3 months ago

If the color scheme weren’t so atrocious, it would almost be possible to read what it says.

pixel_popping6• 3 months ago

It's really bad, it's not using proper fingerprinting techniques, no network stack fingerprinting, no browser history via DNS poisoning, no narrowing down exact country with timing and so on. I mean this is even inferior from basic tools like amiunique, what's the point?

camillomiller4• 3 months ago

It's a piece of AI slop that this user, with an account created 21 days ago, has been spamming here for the third time.

RHSeeger• 3 months ago

We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did.

Bunk. You asked a geolocation api/service to map my ip address back to a location. You _did_ ask for my location, using my IP as a key. And my IP is pretty much required in order for communication on the internet to work (outside of using services to hide it, but then _they_ have your info instead).

ygjb3• 3 months ago

Nah. The browser has a mechanism to request geolocation. This is the ask that was not performed. The user was not asked, which is the important piece.

If I have a dictionary, I don't have to ask the meaning of a word I hear from someone I am speaking to, I can look it up in the dictionary. I may infer an incorrect meaning because the word has multiple meanings or is a colloquialism.

If I need to clarify that inaccuracy, I need other data points (for example, the context of the conversation), or I can ask my conversational partner for clarification).

nozzlegear3• 3 months ago

Nah. The browser has a mechanism to request geolocation. This is the ask that was not performed. The user was not asked, which is the important piece.

The geolocation API requires prompting the user for permission before it can be used: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...

mmooss• 3 months ago

my IP is pretty much required in order for communication on the internet to work (outside of using services to hide it, but then _they_ have your info instead).

Tor and similar multi-hop proxies, depending on construction, supposedly can't match source to destination IPs.

amarant• 3 months ago

It has.. Shall we say tradeoffs.. In terms of latency mostly, but I suspect bandwidth is likely affected too

cortesoft11• 3 months ago

I think you are misreading this. It isn't saying they didn't ask ANYONE, they are saying they never asked YOU as a user for it.

Also, though, of COURSE your address arrived first... how else are they going to send back the data you are requesting?

mikeocool• 3 months ago

As far as this website reports, I'm undistinguishable from most other Mac users in Brooklyn, New York. Seems like it's not actually highlighting the frightening aspects of fingerprint.

ygjb3• 3 months ago

Yeah, your browser fingerprint might be a needle in a needlestack. You might not be able to distinguish one needle from another needle easily, but if you have enough needle samples you can start to identify what the needles are pointing at. Data aggregators collect enough pseudo-indistinguishable needles to be able to disambiguate and associate them with a known identity or cohort. For example, your mobile browser might be indistinguishable from most other Mac users in Brooklyn, but your mobile browser might be the only one running on a device from an IP address that regularly logs a meal in MyFitnessPal at that Starbucks wi-fi before making Apple Pay/Google Wallet purchase, hits the next 8 stops on the train before connecting to the same cell tower at the narrow window as you enter your office (telling on myself a bit, tho I am in Vancouver, not Brooklyn).

Span this across all of your movements and activities across multiple aggregators and it's a trail of movement through a fog of data that is fuzzy, but enough to identify you, or a small cohort of similar users.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 months ago

Perhaps this illustrates the ridiculous level to which website operators make assumptions about website visitors

This phenonemon is much older than "browser fingerprinting"

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 months ago

Opening this page in text-only browser, i.e., no Javascript, CSS, auto-loading resources, etc., it appears to contain zero information about the visitor. Not even an IP address

https://web.archive.org/web/20260508131253if_/https://sincey...

karmakaze• 3 months ago

Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies. I looked for better websites, the EFF one[0] is informative.

My browser fingerprint was unique among the visitors in the past 45 days.

[0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

tossandthrow• 3 months ago

At least in Europe the gdpr still counts, even when you don't use cookies but fingerprinting.

So if you use this information you still need to disclose it and process data in accordance with the law.

Rygian• 3 months ago

In my case, the site reports "The technique is called browser fingerprinting. It is legal everywhere."

It is definitely not legal in Europe, when used to track individual users. The consent pop-ups are not only about cookies.

globalnode• 3 months ago

id still prefer the information be inaccurate. since sites are rude enough to try and track me, the least i can do is feed them unique garbage.

ifh-hn3• 3 months ago

Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking.

Gotta love Firefox with ublock origin in advanced mode, even without JavaScript disabled so the site worked.

eikenberry• 3 months ago

Did you specifically re-enable javascript? Ublock origin on medium mode blocks all the tracking javascript and I'd think advanced would follow the same basic starting point.

capitainenemo3• 3 months ago

uMatrix + NoScript personally (yes, seems silly, but I find NoScript's UI more convenient for script toggling, while liking uMatrix's fine grained controls)

Did you enable firefox resist fingerprinting? Also maybe letterboxing, which I think is not enabled by that flag by default, and also helps with CSS fingerprinting.

therealdrag0• 2 months ago

I got the same in my iPhone using Safari with Firefox Focus installed.

m4ck_• 3 months ago

If i run that (or similar sites) multiple times, shouldn't I like.. not be unique each time?

internet20002• 3 months ago

"It doesn't matter that the FUD isn't accurate" Hmm.

originalcopy• 2 months ago

Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies.

Exactly. A few weeks ago, there was an article about the age limit for social media. And everyone was full of criticism on how it affects privacy. But when there is a post about how browser profile serves de facto as a user identifier, then people are "Of course, what's the problem? We all know that, that's the way it has to be".

GMoromisato• 3 months ago

Someone should do a demo where they take all the info from the browser and feed it to an LLM to describe the person as accurately as possible. I bet it would be 10x better than any horoscope.

camillomiller4• 3 months ago

Another unreadable piece of slop with Claude fonts and style that this user has already spammed three times here with an account created 21 days ago.

This is out of control, and y'all just comment these threads as if they're made by humans.

basilikum• 3 months ago

This volume requires JavaScript. That is part of the point — your browser is what is being read.
With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops.

What? When I enable JS it shows me a lot of stuff that is only queriable with JS.

nottorp3• 3 months ago

An instant loading page without animations and more contrast would have been more fun.

The fact that it begins with my IP address reminds me of those dubious VPN ads.

City is wrong, I may speak English but it's not my native language.

As other people said, there are much better pages showing you your browser fingerprint.

mrguyorama2• 3 months ago

And like most people discussing these things, you entirely miss the point.

It doesn't matter whether you actually speak english natively or not, nobody cares about the actual values. Web sites don't actually care whether you have a robust font package in some way to discern whether you are a font hipster or something, they are just collecting signals.

What matters is that your physical machine and web browser combo report these values about the same way every single time they are probed, and that is used to reliably track YOU, uniquely, with great accuracy, with EVERYTHING you do on the internet, every site you visit, every mouse movement, every purchase linked back to you.

Everything.

The actual values don't have to match "reality" in any way. It's just about generating bits of signal about your setup.

nottorp3• 3 months ago

It doesn't matter whether you actually speak english natively or not

So don't you think presenting the info as it's a great uncovered secret and then getting it wrong will lead the layman to disbelieveing everything?

Of course, the other extreme is the EFF site that says "Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.33 bits of identifying information.".

There must be some middle ground to present this info.

flux3125• 3 months ago

At least it doesn't know my age

Oh wait

Ylpertnodi2• 3 months ago

Netscape user. Always a giveaway.

skerit• 3 months ago

We know this because your IP address was the first thing your device sent us.

First paragraph, and I don't like this wording already. It's as if "my device" has any choice in the matter.

And actually, it's the reverse! Often enough your own device does not know your _actual_ public IP address without asking some kind of public service to snitch on your internet connection.

amarcheschi• 3 months ago

You could have used show hn since you made it

reenorap• 3 months ago

How do we get our browser to stop sending all this information? It's really maddening.

chainingsolid2• 3 months ago

2/3 of the big browsers are open source, you could just change it this year! (Assuming your mobile device isn't from the former personal computer company turned status symbol manufacturer).

Harder problem is getting the economic system that relies on this information swapped out. Have fun when 99% of web doesn't 'work'.

al_borland2• 3 months ago

I tried it with a VPN running and in the Mullvad browser and it got all the big stuff wrong.

Where are you was sent to another location due to the VPN, this was all it really impacted. When you arrived was wrong because of the Mullvad browser, even without the VPN enabled it reports that I'm in Reykjavik, which I'm not. What you brought with you, it got the resolution wrong, as the browser locks itself to various resolutions to prevent this kind of fingerprinting. GPU and Battery both say "kept back", I assume this means it couldn't get anything, because when I run in Safari it says Apple GPU.

internet20002• 3 months ago

Yes, I'm on a MacBook Air in Eastern Time and I speak English. I'd have told the website that myself if they had asked it.

Ylpertnodi2• 3 months ago

Eastern Time, USA, or closer to Bangladesh?

pdntspa• 3 months ago

Your browser discloses a lot more fingerprinting data than this

pimlottc• 3 months ago

I can’t even read this on my phone, the text is too small and the contrast is terrible

jameshart• 3 months ago

Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique

The set of fonts available in stock iOS is hardly going to be unique now is it?

That it is even possible to install fonts onto iOS would be news to most users.

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

This is a great exercise, it's generally accurate on location but it's hard to express how granular they can be Identifying users through browser information. fonts? display size? processor? how unique is that really in laymans terms?

simonbw• 3 months ago

It seems like they know I have an iPhone with dark mode enabled, that I speak English, and that I'm in the USA (but wrong city wrong state). I am kinda unimpressed, I'm pretty sure they can get a lot more info than that.

pugworthy• 3 months ago

Trying this in Lynx I'm surprised it didn't at least get some information from me in the request headers. You don't need JavaScript to pull things out of them.

Aardwolf• 3 months ago

You came here from news.ycombinator.com. Your browser told us the address of the page you were reading before this one. Every link you follow tells the destination where you were. The page you just left knows you left. This page knows where you came from. Neither was asked.

I thought this didn't work anymore and browsers left out the referer in the case of https, is that not so then?

CCoffie• 3 months ago

I believe you only lose the referer header when switching between http and https.

donatj• 3 months ago

The text legibility of the gray on black is a serious problem. My eyes aren't that bad but I can barely read this.

rectang• 3 months ago

My eyes aren't great and I had to pinch-zoom to read parts of this page.

noelsusman• 3 months ago

I am once again asking privacy advocates to try sounding normal for once. Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything.

mpalmer• 3 months ago

It's the usual terse LLM voice that makes everything sound dramatic. Nails on a chalkboard

thrance• 2 months ago

I can't stand this tone, it's truly the worst way to write, ever. Rapid successions of sentences 5 to 8 words long, where each must be impactful and profound but only end up sounding incredibly smug and abrasive. Fuck that.

warkdarrior2• 3 months ago

Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything.

But I am the only person in this timezone in the world. It uniquely identified me!

AlecSchueler• 3 months ago

The claim was that a site could "infer when you sleep, when you work, and when you browse because you cannot sleep." Is that not true? I know that the timing of my HN comments tells a pretty clear story about my schedule having recently looked at a histogram.

aucisson_masque• 3 months ago

Agree, sending my language, if I use dark mode or time zones is all data that can be used to give me a better experience so I don’t mind.

Unai• 3 months ago

You prefer dark interfaces — your operating system told us.

oOoOohh my settings worked as intended, spooky!

voidmain• 2 months ago

But you sacrificed some of your 33 bits of anonymity to have this setting work as intended. And that isn't strictly necessary: the web could have been engineered so that the selection of light or dark styles takes effect in a way undetectable to a web site.

downrightmike• 2 months ago

That's what helped L figure out Kira was in Japan, and likely a student given the times of deaths, in Death Note. Ruled out 7.8 billion people in one step

nirava• 2 months ago

I really enjoyed this comment! The right intersection of everything to fire reward receptors in my brain lol.

Edit: "fire reward receptors in my brain" is probably nonsense scientifically but hopefully it gets the point across

wickerdan• 3 months ago

Its pretty scary when you see it like this

praveen4463• 3 months ago

good stuff but useful for non tech ppl. We already knew those things are exposed by the browser. probably worth putting in x/reddit

moritzwarhier2• 3 months ago

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

does the same or better, without AI regurgitation and a WordPress theme.

hackersnooze1• 3 months ago

it got both my city and browser wrong i am not too concerned lol

baddash• 3 months ago

pretty interesting but why's this website so dramatic, like it thinks it's making me uneasy and paranoid or something

efilife4• 3 months ago

Because it's AI slop. It's the same tone every time

cortesoft11• 3 months ago

Maybe it's just because I am old, or have worked on internet software for almost 30 years, but none of this seems surprising or even concerning?

Someone sets up a server that accepts connections to it and then someone sends a connection request to it.

There has been no agreement on anything, no expectations or rules established. No one forces the server to accept any connection request it gets, and no one forces someone to make a connection request to that server. What the server returns and what the client does with that are completely up to each side.

I feel like this agreement (or lack thereof?) works both ways. I don't think users should get mad if a website decides to use information about your connection request in anyway it chooses, but I also don't think a website should be able to get mad if I do whatever I want with the data it sends to me.

In other words, websites can choose to remember whatever they want about my IP address and my request details, and I can choose to do whatever I want with what they send back to me (i.e. I can block ads or refuse to make followup requests that the site tells me to make, and i can choose to display the response in whatever way i want to) I asked for data, they sent me data.

If I don't want them knowing stuff about me, I shouldn't send that stuff in my request. If they don't want me to have that data unless I also display ads, then they should make me agree to that before sending me the data.

Of course, I know in practice most people don't understand what their browsers are doing, and there aren't a ton of practical choices for people around what their browser sends, and the internet is no longer an optional thing for a lot of our lives. I also know that things like DDOS attacks and the like make a completely 'anything goes' setup impractical.

However, I still have this gut feeling that we shouldn't expect too much from either side when we make an internet request.

scotty79• 3 months ago

Browser volunteering an angle at which I'm holding my phone is a bit surprising.

Matheus28• 3 months ago

Why? Some web apps might want to present a different interface if you’re in landscape.

fjni• 3 months ago

Maybe it's because I'm idealistic in addition to being old, but I think a lot of this functionality was in fact added for explicit purposes.

A client sends the language header or the list of supported fonts not so that the server can "do whatever they want with this data." There is (or was) a real reason for it when we came up with these standards.

The fact that website providers, or more specifically ad-networks, have chosen to use these for other purposes is breaking that implicit agreement.

(edit) but you're probably right that i'm expecting too much.

cortesoft11• 3 months ago

I don’t understand why that would be an implicit agreement, though? Why would I expect that the website would not try to figure out who I am?

They are free to remember whatever they want about my request… but I am also free to modify the request however I want, if I choose to randomize the list of fonts or choose to not send it or whatever.

kelnos2• 3 months ago

Sure, but I think some of the stuff it sends isn't necessary. A website doesn't need to know the list of fonts on my machine, for example.

Some of them are questionable: most websites do not need to know my time zone, but when a website can use that in a useful way related to its functionality, it would be annoying if the browser were to popup an allow/deny dialog, and even more annoying if I had to manually set it in the website's bespoke settings panel.

I'm not sure what the solution is here.

pfortuny• 3 months ago

My students are essentially forced to use MS services. So... there is that.

So am I, come to think of it.

cortesoft11• 3 months ago

That seems more of an issue with the school, though, rather than the actual web request. In this case, there IS a prior agreement between the school and MS, so there can be additional expectations about how that works.

slg• 3 months ago

I think a lot of us old tech folks want to still believe in those techno-libertarian ideals of the old web. However, in order to do that we largely need to ignore the capitalistic and authoritarian ideals of the modern web.

Us not owing each other anything worked great in a prior era when people were largely correct in assuming most people were good actors. But as soon as the money and power of the internet became real, things started to turn more adversarial. The assumption of trust and lack of responsibility makes it easy for one side to take advantage of the goodwill of the other. And the technical and power imbalances inherit to the server-client nature of the web means that abuse is more likely to flow in one direction than the other.

jrumbut2• 3 months ago

I agree entirely. Those of us old enough to have experienced those dreams are naturally going to mourn the loss of the Internet as a place for wild experimentation because we know so much good came from it and there isn't any true replacement.

But it's become clear that in the absence of governance, standards of behavior, and rules both explicit and implicit, the Internet has grown toward tyranny and automated exploitation rather than freedom.

We need to set some rules and expectations that people can rely on, otherwise rules will continue to be imposed on us.

1-more• 3 months ago

You appear to be in Denver, United States. Your internet provider is Netskope Inc. We know this because your IP address — 163.xxx.xxx.32 — was the first thing your device sent us. We know the rest of it. We chose not to display it. Most pages would not have made that choice. We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did.

"We know the rest of it. We chose not to display it. Most pages would not have made that choice" this is written to frighten children maybe? Also that's not my internet provider. Maybe it's my ISPs upstream provider?

rolph• 3 months ago

there was a prank way back, that used simple html, css and javascript, to instruct the browser to display IP address, public, and local, popup a stream from the webcam, and place them among a crafted document intended to trigger i.e. troll people.

no data was cast to internet, it was all code executed with local user permissions to access the devices devices and logfiles displayed inline as "proof" that you are standing on stage with naught but your drawers.

people were at times moved into a panic and could be manipulated into making contact with malignant entities. there were casualties.

never underestimate the damage that can be caused by manipulating perceptions of the current situation,its not a joke, its handgun serious.

jrumbut2• 3 months ago

The location it chose was laughably inaccurate (and since I'm the kind of person who posts here I know why). Censoring the IP address was a little cheesy, but down at the bottom it gets better.

It knew how much my phone was charged and it made correct inferences about my device. It accurately read my gyroscope, how I interacted with the touch screen, and it demonstrated (not new knowledge to me but probably interesting to the general public) how these things could be used to identify you and also to make inferences about you (if you are sitting, standing, lying down, etc).

It starts slow but it got interesting.

footy• 3 months ago

I learned that either my phone's gyroscope is broken or my browser obfuscates it.

Still interesting, even if not surprising.

brudgers2• 3 months ago

Someone sets up a server that accepts connections to it and then someone sends a connection request to it.

My disappointment is not with websites. It is with browsers. They have continuously prioritized dark pattern support. They have consistently removed user control.

I mean it's not the websites that default to recording every keystroke, default to tracker persistence, default to phoning home with daily telemetry, etc.

When I first started using HN, I ran four very different browser engines. Now there's no real choice.

nemothekid3• 3 months ago

None of the information on the website I would argue is a dark pattern. The remote server knows my IP address? Yes that's how the web works.

The server knows my window's resolution? Well I think thats very useful information for the application to have for layouting.

You know what other application is recording my keystrokes right now? HackerNews. "recording keystrokes" is also known as "typing in a text box"

cortesoft11• 3 months ago

Why isn't there choice anymore? Aren't all the major browsers open source?

ryandrake3• 3 months ago

Of course, I know in practice most people don't understand what their browsers are doing, and there aren't a ton of practical choices for people around what their browser sends, and the internet is no longer an optional thing for a lot of our lives.

This is the root problem. Your browser is supposed to be your agent. It's the User Agent, after all! It should be working on the user's behalf, users should understand what their browsers are doing, and browsers shouldn't be doing anything without the user understanding and affirmatively consenting to it. I should be the ultimate authority over what my browser sends, and browsers should make it trivial to exercise that authority.

In reality, the browser is Somebody Else's Agent. It's working for the web developer, giving him all sorts of things that make his life easier. And it's working for the advertiser, providing tracking clues and fingerprinting. And it's working for the browser developer, collecting metrics and telemetry and god knows what else for them to do god knows what with. But, it's not really working for me or on my behalf anymore, I'm just a passenger in the car.

EDIT: Understood that IP address is not something under the browser's control, and it's unfortunately necessary to reveal in order to connect to a web site. It's a terrible mis-feature that IP addresses (by default without a VPN) can be reliably mapped to countries, state/provinces, and sometimes even cities. This is a huge design flaw in how we hand out IPs. In a better world, having an IP address shouldn't reveal anything about someone's geographic location.

cortesoft11• 3 months ago

I don’t think it is as simple as saying browsers are working for the web developer and advertisers.

All the features that allow web sites and ad companies to track and target ads are features that are primarily there to give functionality that makes the web a better experience for users. JavaScript allows websites that are better experiences than not having it. I know some people disagree, but I think they are either intentionally ignoring useful things or have a purity view of the web that doesn’t match most people.

gonzalohm2• 3 months ago

One thing is using information about my connection like my IP and a different one is my browser exposing the angle that I'm holding my phone.

I should be able to expect some privacy from my device. What if my browser starts sending a picture of my front camera with every request, is that okay?

cortesoft11• 3 months ago

No, that wouldn't be ok, but if my browser did that, I wouldn't be mad at the website for doing something with the data I sent them. I would be mad at my browser, not the web site.

xg15• 3 months ago

I remember some users with phpBB signatures some 20 years ago that did the "I know where your IP address lives" trick. Yeah, a bit surprised this is still being done, only today not as some silly troll move in a forum but on some professionally designed website.

reddalo2• 3 months ago

Yeah I totally remember people embedding an "image" which was in fact dinamically generated with PHP, showing the reader's IP or geolocation.

sixtyj2• 3 months ago

I remember late 90s - we made a website that greeted incoming readers with message “Hey, you come from {ip address}.”

Today, it seems that websites track and collect much data as they have partnerships with 1,000 partners (see cookies consent window).

tardedmeme2• 3 months ago

Missing the deforestation for the tree-trimmers? If it was only one or two websites blocking people it wouldn't be a problem.

niutech• 2 months ago

There has been no agreement on anything, no expectations or rules established.

Yes, there has been one expectation: DNT (Do Not Track) header, sent with every request, which should be respected.

____tom____• 3 months ago

I doubt the fonts on my iPhone identify me. As far as I know, they would be the fonts it came with. Or can apps install fonts?

everdrive• 3 months ago

"With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops."

This is surely only partially true.

quietsegfault2• 3 months ago

Jokes on them, they got the wrong IP address, dummies!!! My IP address is 127.0.0.1!

notatoad• 3 months ago

the breathless fearmongering but also condescending tone of this really makes it hard to take seriously. yeah, you can "digitally fingerprint" me when i browse the web. do you know when else you can get my fingerprints? literally any time i touch something in the real world, i leave my fingerprints behind. and nobody is making websites telling us all what a risk to privacy that is.

if you want to make me afraid of browser fingerprinting, try explaining how that information can be used to harm me. i'm aware that it's possible, i just don't care because it doesn't seem like it's that big of a deal.

Swizec• 3 months ago

I love that the very first thing it showed was wrong

San Pablo, California, United States You appear to be in San Pablo, United States. Your internet provider is AT&T Enterprises, LLC. We know this because your IP address — 108.xxx.xxx.233 — was the first thing your device sent us

I am in San Francisco. IPs are not a reliable location identifier and never have been. Especially on mobile. Thank you for coming to my ted talk

mmh0000• 3 months ago

Wow! Somebody with ChatGPT discovered the concept of browser headers, then for some odd reason made the verbiage really ... weird "We chose not to tell you"... okay...

Anyway, if you really want to know what your browser is sending:

https://browserleaks.com/

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

kykat• 3 months ago

Visiting without JS: "With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops."

I find this hyper dramatic LLM language extremely off putting, but appreciate the signal that allows me to completely disregard it.

mcintyre1994• 3 months ago

Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique

Is this actually true? Because I don’t even know if I have any control over this on iOS, and if I do then I’d guess almost nobody diverges from the default?

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

Fair point, and you're right. On iOS the stock font set is essentially uniform across devices in the same OS version, so the "nearly unique" claim doesn't hold there. Just pushed a hedge: prose now distinguishes between desktop (where fonts accumulate via apps and OS over time, and the bundle is genuinely identifying) and iOS/Android (where it isn't, on its own). Combined with screen + GPU + language + timezone the iOS version still narrows the field, but the prose shouldn't overclaim. Thanks.

sitzkrieg2• 3 months ago

dark gray on black text was a terrible choice, virtually unreadable contrast

efilife4• 3 months ago

It's Claude that chose this and it doesn't really have eyes, so that's the reason

sitzkrieg2• 2 months ago

what a terrible reason lol. i should mention i use light mode and it got that wrong to boot

xinan• 3 months ago

I wish it knows that I absolutely hate dark modes with such low contrast.

devmor• 3 months ago

Wow! A significant amount of that information is wrong. I guess my corporate security is doing their job pretty well.

every• 3 months ago

It seems to have a little trouble with lynx... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

binyu2• 3 months ago

They forgot to add timing attack on images load time which can be used to tell if you visited X website.

https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2011/PAPERS/2011/paper010...

lights0123• 3 months ago

Not since browsers started partitioning caches in 2020: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning/

binyu2• 3 months ago

I don't think this protects from sidechannel/timing attacks applied to images load time completely.

Edit: Reading more thoroughly, probably it does to a great extent after all.

bunbun69• 3 months ago

Ok…

Are we supposed to care?

seydor• 3 months ago

I thought the referer was not available under https anymore

relevant_stats• 3 months ago

The stats are wrong - on Android my finger has not moved triple digit times, and I haven't tapped double digit times. In 4 seconds.

My general location is also wrong.

This site's theme is barely visible.

And the entire idea for the site is at least couple decades old.

Unoriginal slop.

looneysquash• 3 months ago

Would be nice if more people were focus on fixing these issues instead of just a bunch of "we already know", and making fun up the tone of the site.

Thanks op for reminding us of the privacy issues with our browsers. The EFF and others already told us, but the issues remain. Lets hope you're hear to stay and fight for our privacy alongside us.

mwheelz17• 3 months ago

Thanks for that. The page isn't trying to tell anyone something they don't already know, it's trying to put it in front of the people who haven't been told. The bug reports today have been gold and the volume is meaningfully better for them.

ShabbyDoo• 3 months ago

Access to the available font list might be useful for identifying devices likely issued by a particular organization. Unusual fonts that are part of an org's branding usually are installed as part of a standard device image. This allows employees to produce brand-compliant presentations, etc. I was an intern at GE in the mid-90's and we had a custom font with just one character defined - the "meatball" corporate logo.

nyumat• 3 months ago

Another vibe-sloped false-integrity derivative. Cmon, OP..

flint• 3 months ago

Something attacked my computer. I shut the page, and some old one popped up. I shut it, and they popped up again I shut my browser, and Notepad++ was filling with <cr><lf> I closed Notepad++, closed every open app, and restarted.

simonw• 3 months ago

Cute detail: if you switch to another tab and then back again it shows a banner at the top:

You left for 6.3 seconds. We noticed.

YeGoblynQueenne• 3 months ago

Huh? The user mwheelz seems to have been [dead]'d in the time this post has been on the front page. If I look at their comments page, those posted more than 46 minutes ago (at the time of writing) are normally visible and the rest are [dead].

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mwheelz

Mods, is there something we should know? Is there maybe a reason to stay away from the linked website?

CyberDildonics• 2 months ago

Huhh?? Oh dear, ok but it's because they ai generated everything to make a poor copy of other websites.

nick49488171• 3 months ago

The gyroscope and battery should not be getting exposed without permission. That seems unexpectedly invasive, and I'm in tech.

Also we should disable referrer field.

kbigdelysh• 3 months ago

So if they can figure out whether I have an expensive laptop/computer based on my graphic card, then they can adjust the prices I see on the page (e.g.higher prices for game devs/players and lower prices for plumbers). Not fair.

barbs• 3 months ago

"Your screen is 320 by 568 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display."

Not quite, I'm on a 2016 iPhone SE

yard20102• 3 months ago

Tell me what kind of smell my last fart had. Now this will be scary.

arkensaw• 3 months ago

You have been on this page for 92 seconds. You scrolled 0% of the way down. You never left this tab.

Uhm... how did I get to the bottom if I scrolled 0%?

tristor• 3 months ago

None of the information identified for me was surprising using an up-to-date Firefox on Mac w/ a mostly default configuration. I had to unblock Javascript in NoScript for the page to work.

I get the point, but I think the EFF Panopticon page is a better representation of browser fingerprinting and how it works, because most of the things shared are really basic elements of data that aren't personally identifiable. You can absolutely fingerprint Firefox with a default config, so obviously this was vibe-coded and just doesn't do much. Cool, you did a GeoIP lookup, read the user-agent, the referrer header, and the accessibility data, exactly zero of that should be surprising to anyone that knows how you access a website.

shepherdjerred• 3 months ago

How did you prompt Claude to be so paranoid but also bad at fingerprinting?

Of course the browser knows my IP and language. Nothing on this page is really surprising

cyanydeez• 3 months ago

hrm. We need a modified browser that just randomly switches the finger prints for linkndin.

D2OQZG8l5BI1S06• 2 months ago

AI really has a problem picking proper fonts, this is barely readable...

byhemechi2• 2 months ago

Unreadable and useless vibe coded shit. Submissions like this are why I've all but stopped using HN

LPisGood• 2 months ago

I didn’t find it unreadable. It was pretty neat in my opinion.

byhemechi2• 2 months ago

45% grey text on a 10% grey background set in a light serif font.

MrDresden• 2 months ago

Yet even with all this information most webpages still insist on showing me the language version of the country who's IP address I have rather than, you know, using the preferred language selection.

It's almost like web devs don't know the concept of traveling outside ones county.

doondoob• 2 months ago

The biggest annoying thing was the clearly AI written doom-voice. Why did this make the front page?

y42• 2 months ago

Shameless plug: It's not that fancy but follows the same principle:

https://institut-fdh.de/?2026-aya

There's also this well known page which does the exact same thing in a more ordered way:

https://browserleaks.com/

cadamsdotcom• 2 months ago

Whoever made this page, you need to rip out the fade in animation.

I lasted 4 seconds on your page.

A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

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