this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
2286 points (99.3% liked)

Technology

60053 readers
2862 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Honestly would be hard to do. There a perfectly legitimate and everyday uses for pretty much everything used in fingerprinting. Taking them away or obscuring them in one way or another would break so much.

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Librewolf has Resist Fingerprinting which comes pretty far.

Every Librewolf browser uses the same windows user agent, etc. But there are downsides, like time zones don't work, and sites don't use dark mode by default.

And even then, EFF's Cover Your Tracks site can still uniquely identify me, mainly through window size. That's one of the reasons why Tor Browser uses letterboxing to make the window size consistent.

[–] DetachablePianist@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Librewolf supports letterboxing as well, though the setting might be disabled by default

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Oh neat! I just tried it, and it seems it's broken on Gnome when using 125% scaling though :/ Still cool to have the feature!

I also just figured out how to expose dark mode and my timezone though with RFP, which is useful.

[–] mitrosus@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't know what letterboxing is. But if window size is used to identify me, can't it be circumvented simply by using the window in restored size, and not maximised?

[–] veniasilente@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Your restored window size is even more unique than your maximised window size!

The correct solution is to just not make the window size available to JS or to remotes at all. There's no reason to ever need specifics on window size other than CSS media-queries, and those can be done via profiles.

[–] mitrosus@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But the restored size keeps changing - can't be profiled, right?

And how do I not make the size available "to JS or to remote"?

[–] veniasilente@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Changing the source code of the browser, unfortunately. I don't know what Tor Browser does or how, but basically you'd have to do about the same as they do.