Technology

76917 readers

3379 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

L3s@hackingne.ws

L4s@hackingne.ws

230

Browser Fingerprinting And Why VPNs Won’t Make You Anonymous (hackaday.com)

submitted 15 hours ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

67 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.

(page 2) 17 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] afox@lemmy.world 20 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

Good luck I'm behind 7 proxies

[–] Nighed@feddit.uk 1 points 8 hours ago

If you go to the site, what does it think of your fingerprint?

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 4 points 13 hours ago (6 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.

load more comments (6 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] BaroqueInMind@piefed.social 9 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Until someone invents real-life Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics from the cyberpunk genre, where doing shit you dont like leads them to have their equipment destroyed with electricity surge, nothing you do online is private nor is there any consequences from them enumerating everything about you to sell or use maliciously.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 9 points 14 hours ago

What a pointless article.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 4 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

Does anonymous mode browsing+VPN improve this? I would think it would

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

You can't hide or get rid of the browser fingerprint, but some addons can help to randomize it so it looks like you're using a different device every time you visit a site.

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 2 points 8 hours ago

Is Firefox's claimed Anti fingerprinting technology any good?

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 12 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Personally, I don’t care if a site can fingerprint me. As long as they can’t tie that fingerprint to a rich data set.

So I make sure that each domain gets a different fingerprint response. That means that a site can validate that I’m still the same user, but any XSS attempting fingerprint based data exchange just gets garbage.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments