I'm not going to rant about this at length, but I have never seen a tool that assesses fingerprintability of browsers which is not complete utter bullshit.
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I'm not going to rant about this at length, but I have never seen a tool that assesses fingerprintability of browsers which is not complete utter bullshit.
Fingerprint randomization makes you easier to track because it is detectable and rare.
None of these tools say what incremental identifying information an attribute provides given other attributes.
For example, on a mobile device, your screen resolution gives a pretty good idea of what device it is because there are rarely more than a few popular devices at any given time with a particular screen resolution, and especially on a given carrier.
If I know your IP address I can predict your time zone >95% of the time, and your language setting within a couple possibilities almost as often. If I know you're using Chrome/Firefox/Safari, you're almost certainly using a release less than two months old.
TLS fingerprinting has approximately zero privacy impact.
None of this is to say that I would be upset in the slightest if the advertising surveillance complex ceased to exist, but scaremongering kills credibility.
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I'm not going to rant about this at length, but I have never seen a tool that assesses fingerprintability of browsers which is not complete utter bullshit.
Fingerprint randomization makes you easier to track because it is detectable and rare.
None of these tools say what incremental identifying information an attribute provides given other attributes.
For example, on a mobile device, your screen resolution gives a pretty good idea of what device it is because there are rarely more than a few popular devices at any given time with a particular screen resolution, and especially on a given carrier.
If I know your IP address I can predict your time zone >95% of the time, and your language setting within a couple possibilities almost as often. If I know you're using Chrome/Firefox/Safari, you're almost certainly using a release less than two months old.
TLS fingerprinting has approximately zero privacy impact.
None of this is to say that I would be upset in the slightest if the advertising surveillance complex ceased to exist, but scaremongering kills credibility.
@ryanc my conspiracy theory is that these "privacy discussions" are being pushed by scraper authors who want to appear as legitimate browsers and are lacking (efficient) tech for it.
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@ryanc my conspiracy theory is that these "privacy discussions" are being pushed by scraper authors who want to appear as legitimate browsers and are lacking (efficient) tech for it.
@untitaker I mean, my bias here is that I do anti-bot work, and think the scrapers are entitled twatwaffles.
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I'm not going to rant about this at length, but I have never seen a tool that assesses fingerprintability of browsers which is not complete utter bullshit.
Fingerprint randomization makes you easier to track because it is detectable and rare.
None of these tools say what incremental identifying information an attribute provides given other attributes.
For example, on a mobile device, your screen resolution gives a pretty good idea of what device it is because there are rarely more than a few popular devices at any given time with a particular screen resolution, and especially on a given carrier.
If I know your IP address I can predict your time zone >95% of the time, and your language setting within a couple possibilities almost as often. If I know you're using Chrome/Firefox/Safari, you're almost certainly using a release less than two months old.
TLS fingerprinting has approximately zero privacy impact.
None of this is to say that I would be upset in the slightest if the advertising surveillance complex ceased to exist, but scaremongering kills credibility.
@ryanc with all of that (and I agree with you completely) there is benefit for people knowing what their metadata says about them and how much of it there is.
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I'm not going to rant about this at length, but I have never seen a tool that assesses fingerprintability of browsers which is not complete utter bullshit.
Fingerprint randomization makes you easier to track because it is detectable and rare.
None of these tools say what incremental identifying information an attribute provides given other attributes.
For example, on a mobile device, your screen resolution gives a pretty good idea of what device it is because there are rarely more than a few popular devices at any given time with a particular screen resolution, and especially on a given carrier.
If I know your IP address I can predict your time zone >95% of the time, and your language setting within a couple possibilities almost as often. If I know you're using Chrome/Firefox/Safari, you're almost certainly using a release less than two months old.
TLS fingerprinting has approximately zero privacy impact.
None of this is to say that I would be upset in the slightest if the advertising surveillance complex ceased to exist, but scaremongering kills credibility.
@ryanc I’m pretty sure I saw something like you just described ages ago but I forgot who built it. EFF maybe?
It wasn’t explaining how attributes correlate together but was showing each piece of information it was collecting and how that related to the rest of the world (they collected, at least)
It was about the same time Tor Browser started implementing security controls for window / view size so quite a few years back
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I'm not going to rant about this at length, but I have never seen a tool that assesses fingerprintability of browsers which is not complete utter bullshit.
Fingerprint randomization makes you easier to track because it is detectable and rare.
None of these tools say what incremental identifying information an attribute provides given other attributes.
For example, on a mobile device, your screen resolution gives a pretty good idea of what device it is because there are rarely more than a few popular devices at any given time with a particular screen resolution, and especially on a given carrier.
If I know your IP address I can predict your time zone >95% of the time, and your language setting within a couple possibilities almost as often. If I know you're using Chrome/Firefox/Safari, you're almost certainly using a release less than two months old.
TLS fingerprinting has approximately zero privacy impact.
None of this is to say that I would be upset in the slightest if the advertising surveillance complex ceased to exist, but scaremongering kills credibility.
@ryanc and despite all that information, 90% of the Belgian websites still serve the wrong language by default to French-speaking visitors.
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