Anonymous Browser Fingerprinting

Anonymous Browser Fingerprinting.

Link: test your browser. This produces a webpage with your browser fingerprint hashcode result.

Note: Article contains link for code of the browser fingerprinting tool on github.

-- Tom

 

This has been a concern of mine for a while. Is there a way to make my fingerprint more generic without breaking functionality?

 

There is a test tool at EFF - i.e. Panoticlick that tests your browser for uniqueness. The idea is that if you look like most everyone else, then you are not uniquely identifiable. The test will tell you how many unique bits of information your browser contains, and so, the task ahead would be to decrease that number.

In my case, I have a lot of browser plugins, that account for most of the value, so I would have to delete a number of plugins and probably change the User Agent String to something else to lower my score.

-- Tom

 

You could use the Tor Browser Bundle. Everyone using it has the same fingerprint.

 

Oh interesting. Regardless of add-ons and screen resolution, etc?

 

Changing add-ons would break that. I'm not sure about screen resolution.

 

the links in this thread to test browser fingerprint require running java code. I decided to skip the first one since I didn't want to install a browser fingerprinter on my computer, and with the second one (panopticlick) I got warning messages per default Java control panel security settings. so assuming the user is not willing to run rogue java code at each site they visit, how easy is it to actually track someone based on their browser fingerprint?

 

Hi pajenn,

The 2nd link in message #1 above requires only that Javascript be turned on in your browser's preferences, i.e. I do not have java on my computer and can run it successfully, ergo, it does not require running Java code which is different from Javascript upon which most web pages are based.

With regard to Panopticlick, it requires you to accept a security certificate from EFF before running the test.

-- Tom

 

??

I open that page; fingerprintJS by valve, and it has some links on the left for zip and tar downloads, and instructions for running the js files from the downloads on my system, presumably to obtain the fingerprint. the page itself certainly doesn't automatically show my browser fingerprint. fwiw, i tried it on several different browsers.

 

The browser fingerprint is half way down the web page before the License and says:

Your browser fingerprint

which is followed by a number on the next line which is the hash (or value) of your fingerprint. The different browsers you tried should have different fingerprints values.

-- Tom

 

ok, got it. thanks.