Privacy concerns raised about upcoming Client-Hints web standard

guest · May 16, 2019

Privacy concerns raised about upcoming Client-Hints web standard
Brave devs warn about new alternative user fingerprinting method being rolled out with Chromium-based browsers
May 16, 2019
https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-concerns-raised-about-upcoming-client-hints-web-standard/

Developers of the privacy-focused Brave browser have raised concerns last week about possible user privacy issues in Client-Hints, a new internet standard currently pending approval by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
The Brave team suggests third-party web servers could abuse Client-Hints to secretly fingerprint and track users across the internet, a side-effect of the protocol's design.
CREATED FOR RESPONSIVE IMAGES
Put forward by Google engineer Ilya Grigorik back in 2015, Client-Hints was developed as a tool for content negotiation and automatic resources selection.

The idea was to have a mechanism at the HTTP header level that would share this information so servers could provide images at the optimum size to a browser, with minimal delay and content negotiation.
PRIVACY CONCERNS -- ALTERNATIVE TRACKING METHOD
"Adding Client-Hints into the browser platform would expose an additional tracking method to block and potentially make it even more difficult to maintain a usable, private Web," the Brave team said last week in a blog post criticizing the new protocol.
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PRIVACY CONCERNS -- THIRD-PARTY ACCESS
In addition, the Brave team is also raising a sign of alarm about websites being allowed to instruct browsers to share Client-Hints information with third-parties, and with no way for users to prevent it.
This is worrisome because third-party domains that just load an image -- and have no ability to run JavaScript on a site -- could be receiving the information to fingerprint users based on Client-Hints alone.
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Rasheed187 · May 18, 2019

This is getting crazier and crazier. So basically the "Internet Engineering Task Force" is facilitating browser developers to make it easier to track people?

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Privacy concerns raised about upcoming Client-Hints web standard

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