They have been for years.
Things which were obvious for any paranoid I2P user 15 years ago, and were being discussed in Freenet 20 years ago, and by cypherpunks 30 years ago, are again new and unexpected.
See, you can murder people in the open if you can make it comfortable enough for everyone to ignore it.
Surveillance and censorship should be scarier, because without them you can cry out about the murderer or avoid strategic disadvantage against the murderer, but are not - most people haven’t been in real danger they understood. And even if they were - suppose that’s already happening, people are being murdered in the open, censorship and surveillance happen, and the latter causes more outrage, - we all can see nobody cares enough to pay with a few bruises for opposing it, not just their living, health, life.
Here we are.
Headline should read “Websites have been tracking you by browser fingerprinting for a while. Google publicly doing it for 6 months.”
Test your footprint: https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/
How effective is the TOR browser against CreepJS?
100%. They all look the same.
Wow, epic slowpokes. Anti-light tier of slowpokeness.
Tell them that the USSR is no more and people already were on the Moon. And the Earth is almost spherical. Just in case, you know, better be updated than sorry…
privacy.resistFingerprintingWhy is that even an option you can disable?
It is not the default because it can also break meaningful functionality.
Seems like that might be useful to have a per-site toggle.
i mean, yeah?
the cookies you accept, the addons you have, hell, even the size of your monitor when you maximalise the window is a part of your browser fingerprint
anyone who’s ever downloaded the Tor browser will know it. that browser screams at you if you try to maximalise or install addons exactly because of that
I heard about a browser extension that could spoof fingerprints.
Canvasblocker?
They were doing this a decade ago, to help track app marketing campaigns.
IIRC, it turned out you could get pretty close to uniquely identifying a device with permutations on only 7 attributes. The problem is if you install a plugin to return false data, it could break non-malicious websites, like running games or data visualizations.
Am I misunderstanding something? Wouldn’t that just be 7! = 5040 possibilities?
You’re mistakenly assuming the attributes are binary, stuff like screen resolution, regions, languages all have many possible values to help narrow down and identify you. It really doesn’t take that many for you to be identifiable.
Oh right, thanks
I really wish there was a foolproof way of preventing fingerprinting. Disabling JavaScript unfortunately isn’t really an option, no-one builds websites with progressive enhancement in mind these days.
Same you can try noscript but its not very effective from blocking fingerprinting from what I know
JShelter and uBO medium mode to the rescue. Pair that with Librewolf and you’re pretty secure against fingerprinting.
The more people disable JS, the more websites won’t require it.
It’s just unrealistic to expect any size of the population to even understand what JS is, much less understand why and how it’s problematic and even beyond that, how to disable it, and even further to expect them to walk away from the 90%+ of sites using it on the web.
No shit
This is why I use Firefox + Canvasblocker + ublock origin I try to disable Javascript if it isn’t required for functionality for the stuff am doing or I trust the site (using noscript)
Noscript on my personal machines
Marketers are a pox
If you’re a marketer, fuck you get a real job.
Lets you question how digital stalking is still allowed?
Could we just create random fingerprints each time the website was visited?
Yes, but if they combine your fingerprint with your IP, they can see that there are 9 unique fingerprints and several others seemingly changing at random, ergo 10 people.
This isn’t new. Reddit is infamous for this too
Soooo, how do I access the full article? I have to pay? Lol
