Privacy

31934 readers

627 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Is it even possible to protect yourself from fingerprinting? (kbin.run)

submitted 4 months ago by strawberry@kbin.run to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Even though i have Proton VPN blocking trackers and use firefox with arkenfox EFF always says my browser has a unique fingerprint. Same with Mullvad browser and Tor. When I switched Tor to "Safer" it said near unique fingerprint, and only when i switched it to safest did it say i am protected from fingerprinting

from my results id guess that it has no fingerprit thanks to no javascript, but 90% of websites are useless without js

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

always says my browser has a unique fingerprint.

That's mysterious! It's hard to entirely smudge away your digital fingerprint, but getting 100% unique match makes me think something important in your setup might be missing.

Does it say why?

Do you get the same result in a "Private Browsing" session?

Are your cookies set to clear automatically?

If you're allowing 3rd party cookies, you're going to have a unique fingerprint 100% of the time. That would certainly do it.

I can't think of another reason you would get 100% unique match over and over, though.

Are you running nightly releases of your browsers? That shouldn't get 100%, but could if you're unlucky. Or a big pack for browser plugins that love to announce themselves? I'm grasping at straws now.

Edit: You can press F12, while in your browser, and find a tab called 'Network' to see details of what your browser is sending out about you. Pay particular attention to 'headers' and 'cookies'. If those are too informative, it gives you a unique fingerprint. 99.99% of everyone has a unique digital fingerprint. But some basic techniques, studiously applied, should take you out of that pool.

Source: Websites have no idea who I am a lot of the time, generally when I choose. I'm clever and well informed, but I'm really just doing the same stuff you find in most short online guides to privacy.