petersuberGreat idea: A web page that simply shows you the info your browser shares about you and your system whenever you open a web page.
https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken
GrumpyDad 🇺🇦🇵🇸@petersuber Is there any way to block or fudge that info?
Andreas K@grumpydad @petersuber Depending upon how brutal you want to be.
Basically it's called fingerprinting, and it comes with the joys of Javascript -> Javascript today is quite powerful -> but sadly that implies that it has access to quite a bit of your hardware -> and different hardware & software carry "information" in a statistical sense.
But yes, different browsers and extensions provide different levels of anti-fingerprinting support. Starting the extreme with LibreWolf.
But LibreFold in it's default setting also means that it will start in certain default window sizes (so the window/screen size cannot be used for fingerprinting), by default the Canvas API is disabled that many websites use for Image manipulation or rendering complex stuff, ah, and it defaults to reporting UTC as your timezone, so you get half the year the correct time if you live in London, UK.
And yes, the moment you start to customize your browsing experience with extensions, you become
again more fingerprintable. There is no magic here. The EFF site (if memory serves) has one useful aspect, it shows you how unique your fingerprint is -> how many browsers configs like yours showed up in the month or so at their website. If there are millions others, you are relatively safe. If there only 50000, less so. If there are only 10 other browsers like yours, … -> if it's unique, then it does not matter if you use a VPN or Tor.
That's why you should use the Torbrowser with Tor, btw.
That's why you should use the Torbrowser with Tor, btw.
@yacc143 Well, i am using Librewolf and I have some of the settings down, but I'm really interested if there's a good way to fudge the output in some way to give false/random info
@grumpydad Hard.
Because the Info is for the most part runtime info about what APIs and objects (e.g. fonts) are available on the browser runtime.
and that makes it hard to decide. Let's lie about this and that -> is the website querying that information for fingerprinting, or because it's preparing to render its UI?
One misconception that many people still have is that on PCs/laptops browsers primarily use IP-based geolocation. So if you run a VPN to Antarctica, Google will show you the Antarctica page.
Sadly, that's not exactly the truth. If you have Wifi on your device (e.g. a laptop) and you allow the browser to tell the location, it will usually use the same techniques of using the available WLANs to triangulate your location.
Trust me, 2 years ago or so, I was literally setting up my new work laptop during my vacation, and my internet was USB tethering via an EU-roaming mobile. So I truly knew that I had a direct connection at the mobile network gated connection back to the home network, and I had an Austrian IP. For some reasons I ran a regulator-based net speed test, and it asked me in the browser for location permission, and trust me I was quite surprised that it was capable of telling exactly which vacation
bungalow we were in (the bungalows had each their separate Wifi IDs). I double checked, because I was rather irritated, but yes, Chrome uses available Wi-Fi networks to estimate its location if they are available. That's more or less what "rough position" is on Android.
In a way it's completely transparent; it asks for your permission. In another way, it's completely misleading, as few people realize how precise it is in most cases.