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by Beijinger 938 days ago
99% of what? of ads not served? You are mixing ads and tracking and in the end, you can be tracked because you are still unique:

With my heavily, via plug-ins, privacy focused firefox I get 99%.

With https://www.amiunique.org/fingerprint I get:

Yes! You are unique among the 2206539 fingerprints in our entire dataset.

PS: with my vanilla Chrome - I use several browsers, for banking and buying plane tickets I always recommend a vanilla one - I get 47% with many things blocked. Is this thing working correclty? I just checked my hosts file and it is vanilla too. I used to have a large hosts file but this is just inconvenient since it breaks sites. I don't understand why so many things may be blocked in my chrome browser.

PPS: I wanted to give it a try in https://browsershots.org/ Is this site defunct? Whata pity.

2 comments

> in the end, you can be tracked because you are still unique

Unique isn't a bad thing really. The trick is to regularly be unique in a different way. I'd rather each tab have a unique fingerprint than simply trust that there's nothing about my browser/device that could identify me. There is an ever growing list of data points your browser makes available and a lot of time, money, and research that goes into finding fingerprinting techniques.

I agree it's good to have a locked down browser for most things and other browsers for websites that you can't get working with everything blocked. Brave is worth a try before you hand your browsing history over directly to Google with chrome or to MS with edge.

> Unique isn't a bad thing really. The trick is to regularly be unique in a different way.

This perspective is new to me, and very interesting. If it's intractable to know which parts of the finger could change, the fingerprinting becomes useless.

99% as a score of this reproducible ad blocker test. You can see the individual tests on the site. I'm not saying it's a gold standard or anything, just a tool I happen to use. And you're right, passive tracking is a b.tch :)