Browser fingerprinting ‘more prevalent on the web now than ever before’ – research New tool allows users to prevent themselves from being tracked online August 20, 2020 https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/...lent-on-the-web-now-than-ever-before-research White paper: "Fingerprinting the Fingerprinters: Learning to Detect Browser Fingerprinting Behaviors" (PDF - 543 KB): https://www.umariqbal.com/papers/fpinspector-sp2021.pdf
Dang snoopers. And their grubby nibbling at our browsers anyway. Noticed my canvas fingerprinting add on alerting a bit more lately. Dunno if its related or not. In fact im rather green at covering all their crazy techniques and rely of the add on experts to help in that regard.
Sounds interesting, perhaps they can sell this tech to browsers like Vivaldi and Brave? And I also don't have any illusions about being able to block ALL tracking, it's simply not possible at the moment. There is probably a lot of finger printing taking place in the background, even when using extensions like Ghostery and uBlock. I believe Brave is currently the best browser for privacy.
What do guys think of this, I suppose this doesn't apply to ad-blockers like uBlock and Ghostery? https://palant.info/2020/12/10/how-...xtensions-tend-to-make-fingerprinting-easier/
A lot of people use uBlock Origin. Installing this one extension doesn't really make your browser unique by itself. Remember that if you are indistinguishable inside large minority of people you are still not unique.
i for one don't care about fingerprinting but you should use browsers out of the box if you want to blend in.
Decreasing browser fingerprinting has undeniable benefits for the security aspect as well. Let's not forget that blocking javascripts eliminates also most of the fingerprinting. So we have to worry only about "reliable" websites. If in these websites we enable only the indispensable scripts/frames/iframes we would have already achieved a lot. Decrease the number of installed extensions is always desirable but not always possible. Personal example If I want to take full advantage of Github with my New Moon 28 and Windows XP I have to use an extension that enables the Polyfill component. In the absence of this extension Github informs me that my browser is not supported. And I have enabled only 2 scripts in the browser, because otherwise I can't login and the functionality of the website is disabled. Without extension: With the extension: In this case the extension contributes to make me less indentifiable.
I think that fighting fingerprinting is fighting a losing battle. Virtually anything can be used for id profiling. Even the way we type on our keyboards can be a unique identifier. The main problem is that we humans are creatures of habits and, more importantly, conditioned to involuntary (spontaneous) reactions which are by their nature undetectable to us but not to a profiling software. We can't change something we're not aware of. Even if we were absolutely aware of our bodies and minds, rewiring our neurological workflow at will would be an impossible task. There are so many variables in formula which can be used for digital profiling. Blocking the cross-site tracking is not sustainable solution since the big tech companies, ironically, offer the best solutions in terms of quality of service and security. For instance, despite Google's notoriety, I always get the most relevant results to my queries. I've tried pretty much all privacy oriented search engines, but they all failed at some point. Most of my specific searches ended up with a bunch of non-related links. Not just the search engine. Youtube? Do you really want to live your life without Youtube? (sarcasm). But really, the best source of privacy and security awareness for non Teksavvy people is Youtube. Youtube actually gives you money for your privacy and security content. Everything is a product. If I can get money from your accusations, I'll give you money to do that. The big tech companies are the most trusted trading and payment transactions parties. You don't put your trust in business with anonymous people. That's the trade off. Unless you have chosen to live your online life under the rock, you have to compromise. Any compromise is good enough for a pretty accurate digital profiling.
I read elsewhere that some security extensions (Noscript I don't mention uMatrix because it is eol) are being confused with extensions that put our privacy at risk. Noscript most important task is blocking javascripts. This can also be done with uBlock Origin in Medium mode. Even through the browser itself, all javascript can be blocked. Blocking scripts indirectly protects you from many fingerprinting techniques. Many users, instead of worrying about reducing their fingerprint, worry about being non-unique. For them, being non-unique is equivalent to using a popular browser almost by default. But no one in forums like this uses a default browser in daily browsing. Those who use Tor ( which fully falls into the above category) do so for a very specific purpose. So if we eliminate the non-uniqueness, which in non-Tor browsers is impossible to achieve, the question is: is it preferable to reduce our fingerprint? Each of us has his own personal answer.
