Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by karmakaze 39 days ago
Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies. I looked for better websites, the EFF one[0] is informative.

My browser fingerprint was unique among the visitors in the past 45 days.

[0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

6 comments

> Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies.

Exactly. A few weeks ago, there was an article about the age limit for social media. And everyone was full of criticism on how it affects privacy. But when there is a post about how browser profile serves de facto as a user identifier, then people are "Of course, what's the problem? We all know that, that's the way it has to be".

> Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking.

Gotta love Firefox with ublock origin in advanced mode, even without JavaScript disabled so the site worked.

uMatrix + NoScript personally (yes, seems silly, but I find NoScript's UI more convenient for script toggling, while liking uMatrix's fine grained controls)

Did you enable firefox resist fingerprinting? Also maybe letterboxing, which I think is not enabled by that flag by default, and also helps with CSS fingerprinting.

I used to use umatrix, preferred it to ublock origin advanced mode. However, isn't umatrix unsupported?
It hasn't received updates in a good long while, but seems to work fine, for me anyway. Has some rough edges, logging blocks when there's a bunch of redirects is a bit of a pain, making it hard to fix whitelisting in complicated things (like the dozen domains microsoft uses for auth) but apart from that...
(and ofc there's a bunch of forks adding bugfixes, some even relatively recent in activity, but unfortunately none have become the blessed official maintainer)
Did you specifically re-enable javascript? Ublock origin on medium mode blocks all the tracking javascript and I'd think advanced would follow the same basic starting point.
Yeah, didn't work without it.
I got the same in my iPhone using Safari with Firefox Focus installed.
If i run that (or similar sites) multiple times, shouldn't I like.. not be unique each time?
At least in Europe the gdpr still counts, even when you don't use cookies but fingerprinting.

So if you use this information you still need to disclose it and process data in accordance with the law.

In my case, the site reports "The technique is called browser fingerprinting. It is legal everywhere."

It is definitely not legal in Europe, when used to track individual users. The consent pop-ups are not only about cookies.

id still prefer the information be inaccurate. since sites are rude enough to try and track me, the least i can do is feed them unique garbage.
"It doesn't matter that the FUD isn't accurate" Hmm.