Websites Are Tracking You Via Browser Fingerprinting
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Headline should read "Websites have been tracking you by browser fingerprinting for a while. Google publicly doing it for 6 months."
Test your footprint:
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/
Am I Unique ?
Check if your browser has a unique fingerprint, how identifiable you are on the Internet
(www.amiunique.org)
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Texas A&M guys.. we knew about this like 11 years ago back around when Adobe Flash was still a thing:
Device Fingerprinting: Browser Extensions
It's only become a bigger issue as time progressed.
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Things which were obvious for any paranoid I2P user 15 years ago, and were being discussed in Freenet 20 years ago, and by cypherpunks 30 years ago, are again new and unexpected.
See, you can murder people in the open if you can make it comfortable enough for everyone to ignore it.
Surveillance and censorship should be scarier, because without them you can cry out about the murderer or avoid strategic disadvantage against the murderer, but are not - most people haven't been in real danger they understood. And even if they were - suppose that's already happening, people are being murdered in the open, censorship and surveillance happen, and the latter causes more outrage, - we all can see nobody cares enough to pay with a few bruises for opposing it, not just their living, health, life.
Here we are.
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i mean, yeah?
the cookies you accept, the addons you have, hell, even the size of your monitor when you maximalise the window is a part of your browser fingerprint
anyone who's ever downloaded the Tor browser will know it. that browser screams at you if you try to maximalise or install addons exactly because of that
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privacy.resistFingerprinting -
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I heard about a browser extension that could spoof fingerprints.
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They were doing this a decade ago, to help track app marketing campaigns.
IIRC, it turned out you could get pretty close to uniquely identifying a device with permutations on only 7 attributes. The problem is if you install a plugin to return false data, it could break non-malicious websites, like running games or data visualizations.
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I really wish there was a foolproof way of preventing fingerprinting. Disabling JavaScript unfortunately isn't really an option, no-one builds websites with progressive enhancement in mind these days.
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This is why I use Firefox + Canvasblocker + ublock origin I try to disable Javascript if it isn't required for functionality for the stuff am doing or I trust the site (using noscript)
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I heard about a browser extension that could spoof fingerprints.
Canvasblocker?
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I really wish there was a foolproof way of preventing fingerprinting. Disabling JavaScript unfortunately isn't really an option, no-one builds websites with progressive enhancement in mind these days.
The more people disable JS, the more websites won’t require it.
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privacy.resistFingerprintingWhy is that even an option you can disable?
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Why is that even an option you can disable?
It is not the default because it can also break meaningful functionality.
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Really bad headline. The actual article is about a study showing that browser fingerprinting is being used in real time in pricing target ads to your browser.
To investigate whether websites are using fingerprinting data to track people, the researchers had to go beyond simply scanning websites for the presence of fingerprinting code. They developed a measurement framework called FPTrace, which assesses fingerprinting-based user tracking by analyzing how ad systems respond to changes in browser fingerprints. This approach is based on the insight that if browser fingerprinting influences tracking, altering fingerprints should affect advertiser bidding — where ad space is sold in real time based on the profile of the person viewing the website — and HTTP records — records of communication between a server and a browser.
“This kind of analysis lets us go beyond the surface,” said co-author Jimmy Dani, Saxena’s doctoral student. “We were able to detect not just the presence of fingerprinting, but whether it was being used to identify and target users — which is much harder to prove.”
The researchers found that tracking occurred even when users cleared or deleted cookies. The results showed notable differences in bid values and a decrease in HTTP records and syncing events when fingerprints were changed, suggesting an impact on targeting and tracking.
Additionally, some of these sites linked fingerprinting behavior to backend bidding processes — meaning fingerprint-based profiles were being used in real time, likely to tailor responses to users or pass along identifiers to third parties.
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They have been for years.
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Really bad headline. The actual article is about a study showing that browser fingerprinting is being used in real time in pricing target ads to your browser.
To investigate whether websites are using fingerprinting data to track people, the researchers had to go beyond simply scanning websites for the presence of fingerprinting code. They developed a measurement framework called FPTrace, which assesses fingerprinting-based user tracking by analyzing how ad systems respond to changes in browser fingerprints. This approach is based on the insight that if browser fingerprinting influences tracking, altering fingerprints should affect advertiser bidding — where ad space is sold in real time based on the profile of the person viewing the website — and HTTP records — records of communication between a server and a browser.
“This kind of analysis lets us go beyond the surface,” said co-author Jimmy Dani, Saxena’s doctoral student. “We were able to detect not just the presence of fingerprinting, but whether it was being used to identify and target users — which is much harder to prove.”
The researchers found that tracking occurred even when users cleared or deleted cookies. The results showed notable differences in bid values and a decrease in HTTP records and syncing events when fingerprints were changed, suggesting an impact on targeting and tracking.
Additionally, some of these sites linked fingerprinting behavior to backend bidding processes — meaning fingerprint-based profiles were being used in real time, likely to tailor responses to users or pass along identifiers to third parties.
Make surveillance pricing illegal.
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The more people disable JS, the more websites won’t require it.
It's just unrealistic to expect any size of the population to even understand what JS is, much less understand why and how it's problematic and even beyond that, how to disable it, and even further to expect them to walk away from the 90%+ of sites using it on the web.
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Really bad headline. The actual article is about a study showing that browser fingerprinting is being used in real time in pricing target ads to your browser.
To investigate whether websites are using fingerprinting data to track people, the researchers had to go beyond simply scanning websites for the presence of fingerprinting code. They developed a measurement framework called FPTrace, which assesses fingerprinting-based user tracking by analyzing how ad systems respond to changes in browser fingerprints. This approach is based on the insight that if browser fingerprinting influences tracking, altering fingerprints should affect advertiser bidding — where ad space is sold in real time based on the profile of the person viewing the website — and HTTP records — records of communication between a server and a browser.
“This kind of analysis lets us go beyond the surface,” said co-author Jimmy Dani, Saxena’s doctoral student. “We were able to detect not just the presence of fingerprinting, but whether it was being used to identify and target users — which is much harder to prove.”
The researchers found that tracking occurred even when users cleared or deleted cookies. The results showed notable differences in bid values and a decrease in HTTP records and syncing events when fingerprints were changed, suggesting an impact on targeting and tracking.
Additionally, some of these sites linked fingerprinting behavior to backend bidding processes — meaning fingerprint-based profiles were being used in real time, likely to tailor responses to users or pass along identifiers to third parties.
I have never been able to figure out how to block fingerprinting without entirely disabling my browser and it looks like the race to the bottom is accelerating
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I have never been able to figure out how to block fingerprinting without entirely disabling my browser and it looks like the race to the bottom is accelerating
maybe blocking it is the wrong way to go about though. Instead there should be some way to make the fingerprinting data worthless by having everyones browser constantly change things in the background so the fingerprint changes too
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It is not the default because it can also break meaningful functionality.
Seems like it might be useful to have a per-site toggle.
