this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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Browser Fingerprinting And Why VPNs Won’t Make You Anonymous (hackaday.com)
submitted 2 days ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
101 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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[–] FE80@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago (3 children)

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ is the EFF tool.

My results say that I have strong protections against tracking, and that my browser is unique. It's as good as I can get.

The agent switcher also tells the world my Librewolf on Linux is Chrome on Windows.

[–] mirshafie@europe.pub 7 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Isn't it a bad thing to be unique in this context? If my browser is 1 in a million, that means that a tracker can pick me out of a lineup of a million users, no? That's why a captcha can verify you as human simply by checking a box, because it can identify your unique browser as associated with human activity.

If I'm not mistaken, we want the opposite. We want our browsers to be as generic as possible if we don't want to be tracked.

[–] Jyek@sh.itjust.works 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I would think unique means you appear as a never before seen individual and not one they can identify from their fingerprint history. If you fingerprint twice and both are unique, you are secure.

[–] mirshafie@europe.pub 1 points 3 hours ago

This somehow assumes that your fingerprint is going to vary, and be unique, every time you interact with a tracker. That's basically not ever going to be the case for casual use.

If Cloudflare fails the tick-box Captcha and I need to tell it what squares contain motorcycles, that would suggest that I currently have a unique fingerprint that they do not have yet enough history on to tie to a person. How often do you get to do the square puzzle nowadays?

[–] W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 day ago

Thanks for linking it! I should have done that. And if LibreWolf is showing as Chrome on Windows, then you’re good!

[–] W3dd1e@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

Thanks for linking it! I should have done that. And if LibreWolf is showing as Chrome on Windows, then you’re good!