Technology

What search engine do you use?

Mind sharing what extension you use?

You can also use canvas blocker add-on.

Use their containers (firefox multi-account container add-on) feature and make a google container so that all google domains go to that container.

If you want to get crazy, in either set in about:config or make yourself a user.is file in your Firefox profile directory and eliminate all communication with google. And some other privacy tweaks below.

It was never about privacy, it was supposedly about security, which there is some evidence for. There were a lot of malicious extensions. The sensible thing to do would be to crack down on malicious extensions but I guess that costs too much money and this method also conveniently partially breaks adblockers.

Fingerprinting unfortunately uses more than useragent strings. It takes hashes of data in your browser from a javascript context that is not easily masked or removed. For example, it might render a gradient of colors projected onto a curved 3d plane. The specific result of this will create a unique hash for your GPU. They can also approximate your geolocation by abusing the time-to-live information within a TCP packet, which is something you can't control on the clientside at all. If you TRULY want to avoid tracking by google, you need to block google domains in your hosts file and maybe consider disabling javascript on all sites by default until you trust them. Also don't use google.

Jokes aside, keep in mind that the idea of fingerprinting is that your computer's configuration is as unique as a fingerprint (e.g., your monitor is x resolution, you are on this operating system, you are using these following extensions in this browser, you have these fonts on your system).

Setting your user agent to something super unique is basically shining a spotlight on yourself.

I recommend this user agent switcher extension (firefox)

Google were maybe seen as the good guys back in the days of Yahoo search, and perhaps the very early days of Android.

But those times are so long passed. Google has been a tax-avoiding, anti-consumer rights, search-rigging, anti-privacy behemoth for decades now, and they only get worse with each passing year.

That time was like 20 years ago, dude

Not really. The "fingerprint" is not one thing, it's many, e.g. what fonts are installed, what extensions are used, screen size, results of drawing on a canvas, etc... Most of this stuff is also in some way related to the regular operation of a website, so many of these can't be blocked.

You could maybe spoof all these things, but some websites may stop behaving correctly.

Considering how few people block all scripts, this could also make it trivial for them to fingerprint you.

This breaks all kinds of stuff though. A ton of sites use Google for captchas.

Lol

So from what I understand, theres 2 common ways that browsers combat this. Someone add to or correct me if I'm wrong.

1. Browsers such as Mull combat this by looking the same as every other browser. If you all look the same, it's hard to tell you apart. I believe this is why people recommend using default window size when using Tor.

Ex: Everyone wearing black pants and hoodies with the facemasks. Extremely hard to tell who is who.

2. Browsers such as Brave randomize metadata that fingerprinting collects so that it's more difficult to piece it all together and build a trend/profile on someone.

Ex: look like a dog in one place, a cat in another place. They get data for a dog but that doesn't help build anything if the rest of the data is a cat, hamster, whatever. No way to piece it together to be useful.

In both my examples, there are caveats. Just because everyone dressed the same doesn't mean someone isn't taller or shorter, or skinnier or fatter. There can still be tells to help narrow down. Or a cat that barks like a dog suddenly is more linkable to a dog if that makes sense lol.

In other words it still depends user behavior that can contribute to the effectiveness of these tools.

EDIT: got distracted. To answer your question I don't think so. I think it's more about user behavior blending in or being randomized. I think the only thing an extension would be able to do is possibly randomize the data but I'm unsure of such an extension yet. These aren't the only options, these are just ones I've read about recently. Online behavior, browswr window size, and I'm sure so much more also goes into it. But every little bit helps and is better than nothing.

EDIT2: Added examples for each for clarity.