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)

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.

How effective is the TOR browser against CreepJS?

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.

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.

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

Am I misunderstanding something? Wouldn't that just be 7! = 5040 possibilities?

JShelter and uBO medium mode to the rescue. Pair that with Librewolf and you're pretty secure against fingerprinting.

Mullvad has a fork of Firefox they built with TOR (the organization, it does not route over TOR network). Includes NoScript and ublock origin and works by making all browsers the same ( so long as you don’t fsck with it).

You don’t have to use it with their VPN but that’s good, too.

My only complaint is it doesn’t support containers. Otherwise it’s wonderful.

Free the internet. With the Mullvad Browser.

The Mullvad Browser is a privacy-focused web browser developed in collaboration between Mullvad VPN and the Tor Project. It’s produced to minimize tracking and fingerprinting.

Mullvad VPN (mullvad.net)

Canvasblocker?

You're mistakenly assuming the attributes are binary, stuff like screen resolution, regions, languages all have many possible values to help narrow down and identify you. It really doesn't take that many for you to be identifiable.

Could we just create random fingerprints each time the website was visited?

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