this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Privacy

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It was at the Securedrop website. How did I end up there ? I read something about Sequoia and encryption and then wanted to see what Securedrop entailed.

Meanwhile I've raised the security settings. Still, today someone in this community (?) mentioned that Tor browser does not protect the remote to check for the OS, and now this. Color me surprised.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Haven't used amiunique but the EFF one I have seen people criticize because it only checks your uniqueness among people who opted in to take the test, so the results can be highly skewed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The results aren't going to be that skewed. They operate on a simple principle. There are many features available on a modern web browser with a high degree of variability. Even not having a feature is itself a piece of a fingerprint. The combination of those many, many features is going to produce a high degree of uniqueness for almost any browser.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I wasn't trying to debate how the uniqueness is calculated, you're absolutely right on that, and other sites like creepjs do the same, but I think where the eff site is a tad misleading is in how it presents their "just how unique AM I" part of the results, because they only have their own collected data to compare that against.

Sadly I think even disabling JS entirely would take away so much "blending in" that it still wouldn't be hard to uniquely fingerprint a user without it. Even CSS (without JS) and standard HTML tags like "picture" can be used to fingerprint now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Sadly I think even disabling JS entirely would take away so much “blending in” that it still wouldn’t be hard to uniquely fingerprint a user without it. Even CSS (without JS) and standard HTML tags like “picture” can be used to fingerprint now.

Right. I guess there's also a difference between wanting to be as anonymous as possible and wanting to not be tracked too much by some sites.

In some browser profiles I do block JS completely for a few reasons.

  • Let's me read a lot of articles. Even articles with supposedly "paywalls".
  • Clutter free reading. Does it matter that the remote sites can recognize me based on a unique FP and build a profile ? I'm not too bothered. Should I ?

For other use cases I prefer Tor browser without any added extensions.