Damn... I guess the next idea is going offline for good

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[–] 17 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Back in the day there were apps that generated phony web searches to obfuscate your real searches. Seems like there could be tools to mess around and change browser fingerprints periodically. No?

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    It could be done on the browser level (maybe it's something browsers like LibreWolf do), however, it would break sites that require the fingerprints to be the same for "security reasons" which may or may not be a legitimate claim.

    You could say "well, I'm not going to use that particular website then", but the problem is that there are less and less websites that don't require these technologies to function properly.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Can you give an example of one of those websites?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Off the top of my head, no. What I do remember is that I couldn't use Librewolf as my daily browser because I had trouble using every other website. Might be an exaggeration, and it could have been due to other factors, not just resisting fingerprinting.

    I've just come across this article: https://kevinboone.me/fingerprinting.html

    The author describes the situation pretty well:

    you enable fingerprinting resistance in Firefox, or use Librewolf, you’ll immediately encounter oddities. Most obviously, every time you open a new browser window, it will be the same size. Resizing the window may have odd results, as the browser will try to constrain certain screen elements to common size multiples. In addition, you won’t be able to change the theme.

    You’ll probably find yourself facing more ‘CAPTCHA’ and similar identity challenges, because your browser will be unknown to the server. Websites don’t do this out of spite: hacking and fraud are rife on the Internet, and the operators of web-based services are rightly paranoid about client behaviour.

    You’ll likely find that some websites just don’t work properly, in many small ways: wrong colours, misplaced text, that kind of thing. I’ve found these issues to be irritations rather than show-stoppers, but you might discover otherwise.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    Already done, see: https://github.com/uazo/cromite

    When I go to the fingerprint test, a bunch of the values like canvas resolution and timezone are randomized.

    ...Not everything, though.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Interesting... Tor, Mullvad, and other secure browsers, go to the exact opposite approach, though... they try to make everyone look the same so they can't tell you apart across IPs

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago*

    Yeah, exactly.

    Cromite's explicit focus is, literally, antifingerprinting. With the goal of breaking cross site tracking I guess.

    A more accurate goal for Tor/Mullvad is anonymizing, e.g. “blending in with the crowd.”

    It’s like radically changing your clothes every day vs wearing super incognito stuff. Different means, each more optimal for different aspects of security/privacy.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)