this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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Technology

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115
Browser Fingerprinting And Why VPNs Won’t Make You Anonymous (hackaday.com)
submitted 6 hours ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
37 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Amidst the glossy marketing for VPN services, it can be tempting to believe that the moment you flick on the VPN connection you can browse the internet with full privacy. Unfortunately this is quite far from the truth, as interacting with internet services like websites leaves a significant fingerprint. In a study by [RTINGS.com] this browser fingerprinting was investigated in detail, showing just how easy it is to uniquely identify a visitor across the 83 laptops used in the study.

As summarized in the related video (also embedded below), the start of the study involved the Am I Unique? website which provides you with an overview of your browser fingerprint. With over 4.5 million fingerprints in their database as of writing, even using Edge on Windows 10 marks you as unique, which is telling.

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[–] afox@lemmy.world 15 points 5 hours ago (6 children)

Good luck I'm behind 7 proxies

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 3 points 4 hours ago (4 children)

I’m here with multi-hop VPN with the first two hops staying in-country and the rest all random + a shit load of DNS blocking lists and browser extensions + blocking Google. I use different VPN providers too. I’m also introducing variable delays to my traffic to make NetFilter data less helpful.

[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Please understand that browser extensions make you more easy to track. I used to be under the same assumption, but uBO is as far as you should go. fingerprints include your extensions.

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 1 points 2 hours ago

My thinking is that most of the fingerprinting is happening by third parties, and where it’s the website operators themselves I’m not super concerned about being fingerprinted.

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