Everyone talks about how evil browser fingerprinting is, and it is, but I don’t get why people are only blaming the companies doing it and not putting equal blame on browsers for letting it happen.
Go to Am I Unique and look at the kind of data browsers let JavaScript access unconditionally with no user prompting. Here’s a selection of ridiculous ones that pretty much no website needs:
- Your operating system (Isn’t the whole damn point of the internet that it’s platform independent?)
- Your CPU architecture (JS runs on the most virtual of virtual environments why the hell does it need to know what processor you have?)
- Your JS interpreter’s version and build ID
- List of plugins you have installed
- List of extensions you have installed
- Your accelerometer and gyroscope (so any website can figure out what you’re doing by analyzing how you move your phone, i.e. running vs walking vs driving vs standing still)
- Your magnetic field sensor AKA the phone’s compass (so websites can figure out which direction you’re facing)
- Your proximity sensor
- Your keyboard layout
- How your mouse moves every moment it’s in the webpage window, including how far you scroll, what bit of text you hovered on or selected, both left and right clicks, etc.
- Everything you type on your keyboard when the window is active. You don’t need to be typing into a text box or anything, you can set a general event listener for keystrokes like you can for the mouse.
If you’re wondering how sensors are used to fingerprint you, I think it has to do with manufacturing imperfections that skew their readings in unique ways for each device, but websites could just as easily straight up record those sensors without you knowing. It’s not a lot of data all things considered so you likely wouldn’t notice.
Also, canvas and webGL rendering differences are each more than enough to 100% identify your browser instance. Not a bit of effort put into making their results more consistent I guess.
All of these are accessible to any website by default. Actually, there’s not even a way to turn most of these off. WHY?! All of these are niche features that only a tiny fraction of websites need. Browser companies know that fingerprinting is a problem and have done nothing about it. Not even Firefox.
Why is the web, where you’re by far the most likely to execute malicious code, not built on zero trust policies? Let me allow the functionality I need on a per site basis.
Fuck everything about modern websites.
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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I don’t disagree… but we must keep the pressure up. I know I’ve helped a little more than 10 people leave FB and Google (and most of Microsoft)… A couple of them have left Apple too… It’s a slow, but steady movement. :-)
Maybe
I believe that one should leave those platforms for personal reasons. Not as a statement to those companies.
I left because I don’t like being tracked or being forced to accept being tracked. I did not leave because I wanted them to stop tracking their users or to show them that i don’t like them doing it.
Imo these companies won’t change the way they operate and even if they did, I wouldn’t trust them to have done so. They will always find loopholes and workarounds to get to what and where they want.
For me, leaving is a statement, and a personal reason. I don’t see how it could not be both? I don’t know anyone who trusts them. But shifting the powerbalance towards privacy and ethics, will never be a bad thing.