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by extremeMath 2108 days ago
I'm a believer that these kind of issues should be solved at the consumers end.

I haven't built a web browser, but I built a bot and it's somewhat doable to avoid getting tracked.

A browser could feed a fake user agent and format the browser to be the correct size. After that I believe it's only IP address and cookies which are easy enough to be blocked.

It even defeats the CSS tracking mentioned. "Oh someone downloaded image 6374tracker.png, but they were from UAE and are using Firefox" and are never seen again.

My only weakness on this subject is the low level headers, anyone familiar?

2 comments

It has been best practice for some time now to detect not based on user agent, but by features. (plenty still use the UA approach of course)
What low level headers are you thinking of here?
I'm going to name drop things I don't know about and might be irrelevant

Data/network/transport/session layer can be detected through TCP?

So you need to fudge a few digits somehow at your router.