this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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This actually applies to the entire internet, look into fingerprinting. This website checks how susceptible you are to it: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
I like the EFF, but I don't agree with the report this generates. There are two counters to fingerprinting: have the same fingerprint as everyone else (Mullvad Browser is based on this idea) and to have a unique fingerprint that changes regularly (The CanvasBlocker extension supports this approach).
Since most of the time I'm in Firefox with CanvasBlocker, I want to see unique fingerprints, but also that they keep changing.
There's a decent bit in their site as to how fighting fingerprinting by trying to be more common can make you still stand out, so mullvad may not work out depending on how it implements this concept. Randomizing fingerprinting sounds like it could work (I haven't researched it so I don't have enough info to agree or disagree, but sounds legit at the very least) and expecting their report to understand that is beyond the scope of the tool. I mean, you couldn't actually test that method is effective without recording it over multiple sessions/days/etc. Sure you want a unique fingerprint, but seeing a unique fingerprint once doesn't mean it's working.
Fantastic link, I need to do better than I am. I appreciate you sharing this.
For what it's worth protecting against fingerprinting is pretty hard, so don't feel bad if it tells you your browser has a unique fingerprint. For most people (if you're using Firefox) going to the settings and turning on strict tracking protection and "Do Not Track" set to always send is good enough and will probably stop most attempts by blocking domains that will try fingerprinting. And use Ublock Origin, people.
I use Firefox and Ublock, I'll do the do not track now!
Yep. I have a blanket "block all Facebook" rule. A lot harder to gather info if your browser refuses to load data and scripts coming from their domains.
Mullvad's website has this nice widget that checks if your ip address can be found by dns too. Good for busting competitors
OMG this scared me. I thought I was "enough" protected
That site says "Your browser has a unique fingerprint" even though I run Firefox, uBlock, Privacy Badger, and have privacy.resistFingerprinting set to true. My main problem may be plugins, once you have more than a few your set can be pretty unique.
Try going down the page and looking for the categories with more than a few bits of identifying information. I'm running LibreWolf with just uBlock Origin and Dark Reader (which I don't think influences results) and I'm able to get nearly-unique, instead of unique (but I do get unique on default settings). TBB gets non-unique, which is a good set of results to compare to.
In my case I noticed that my fonts were really unique so I set
browser.display.use_document_fonts = 0. Also I use my WM to set my page resolution to 1920x1080, which seems to have a better fingerprint than the default LibreWolf floating resolution of 1600x900 (and even the letterboxing resolutions, from what I can tell).I just spent some time testing again and checking for anything else. RFP does force a generic user agent, but unfortunately it keeps the version information and I can't figure out how to change it with RFP on. Would be nice to set it to the ESR version used by TBB (which has lower bits), but I'm not sure if that would lead to a more unique fingerprint (if, say, a feature was detected that is available in later versions but not ESR).
Edit: just tried Mullvad browser, and it's non-unique! Might be the best option.
Iirc unique != identifiable necessarily, because your fingerprint might be different while still unique the next time around.
Try LibreWolf
Edit: interesting to see this was up voted, then downvoted. Would be good to understand why someone disagrees that LibreWolf would be a viable option here.
what is the best way to regularly change your fingerprint? (I'm using firefox)
Tor Browser, the most trusted and reliable. Also maybe Brave.