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by threeseed
526 days ago
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> Google isn't just a hapless bystander here Google literally added all of the random APIs into Chrome that fingerprinting depends on. If you trust Google then they are a bystander. If you don't then they orchestrated this entire situation over the last decade or so in order to cement the dominance of their advertising business. |
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Your browser needs to be able to render text in different fonts, which means that without paranoid design (and maybe with it) code running there can tell what fonts you have installed.
A web app may want to tell you when something happened in your time zone even though it happened somewhere else. So there's value in having code running in your browser be able to tell what time zone you're in.
Different browsers, and different versions of the same browser, have different bugs. So there's value in letting code running in your browser know what version of what browser you're running. (Note that this information has been exposed by browsers, though not always very honestly, since before Google even existed.)
Browser/device fingerprinting has been possible since before Google ever shipped a browser.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Google has made design decisions in Chrome motivated by not making fingerprinting too difficult. I also wouldn't be surprised to find that they've done the exact reverse. Maybe they've done both. But the possibility of browser fingerprinting isn't the result of some galaxy-brained conspiracy by Google; that was there all along because when browsers first gained the ability to run code the people building the browsers never thought of the danger, and by the time someone did it was already too late.