HN

Comments (52)

• BrenBarn
  > Protections that ship have to keep the web workingI think we should reverse it. Websites that don't work with these protections shouldn't ship. Entities that make websites that try to do this kind of tracking should face legal consequences.
• wellisthisso
  I did not really try that, but it seems to me that a user is easily identifiable by the sites he visits, click patterns, whatever. So, generally speaking, there is no way to escape fingerprinting unless you think about every click you make, which is not really feasible.
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  M95D
  > Protections that ship have to keep the web workingI don't agree. I activated most of the protections. If a site breaks, then I don't get to see it. That's OK. No big loss. Users should fight their FOMO.
• so-cal-schemer
  Always nice to see more research out of UCSD.
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  dt3ft
  > Your browser is not comparable to the dataset, so we have avoided showing you inaccurate results.Yup. Because I use my own browser. Built from scratch with exception of V8, Stylo html5ever, and a few other bits and bobs. A fresh new rendering engine in Rust and all. Not a fork of any existing engine. Native support for uBlock Origin filter lists and custom filters. It scores above ~20 in speedometer as of today and covers WPT about 89%. Will be publishing it soon as permissive open source.
• war-is-peace
  might be a bit futilistic of me, but mitigating browser fingerprinting always seems like a fight against entropy itself, there always seems to be a new metaspend so long changing up settings only to find out there is some niche css rendering quirk that makes me unique to one in a trillion devices or something, and using any variant of linux really doesn't bode well for fitting into the crowd regardlessmaybe time to start using a telegraph key and sounder connected directly to ethernet? or will the cadence of my tapping create a reconigzable pattern between sessions...
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  gausswho
  Ran their fingerprinting test.CSS Colours SelectedItem and SelectedItemText was the only problematic one, and uniquely identified me to less than 0.0054 of Linux users.Why?
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  jbm
  I don't understand. I'm using a standard ios browser with no changes. When it checked my screen resolution, it claimed it was 0.0016% of the browser population.This is a standard iphone running safari; how is that possible?
• bikvfeee
  I use Mullvad browser. It's tor browser minus the tor connection.
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  _factor
  I wonder if this took into account GPU render-time fingerprinting? The minute timing differences in how you render an image are still used to identify you.
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  solarmist
  Oh, damn. I thought this was about the uniqueness of human fingerprints or similar.
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  NooneAtAll5
  funny how enabling letterboxing causes me to be in "under 100 samples" categorybtw, is pixelRatio controllable somehow? how do I set it to 1, most common value?
• ape4
  I read they're not releasing the details - that seems good (for the public). Hopefully they're releasing it to privacy-friendly browser makers.
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  usern20260720
  why can't my browser curl download an .html package, as a word processor would download a .doc file, instead of betraying my privacy by publishing even my underwear size?
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  vova_hn2
  I understand that the HN crowd is composed of many different people with radically different interests and opinions, so an "average HN opinion" would be mostly meaningless, but still...I find it mildly amusing that HN both loudly complains about bots scraping their websites AND is very interested in user privacy.The conflicting part is that user privacy automatically means that you cede any control over how exactly does the user accesses your resource. Whether they use a web browser or an automated scraper. Any attempt to analyze requests to tie different requests made by the same actor together automatically means privacy violation.I don't have a good answer to this dilemma yet, I just thought that this is a curious observation and wanted to share.
• jocelyner
  [dead]
• ilkerguldali
  [dead]