this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
41 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
10059 readers
392 users here now
A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
Rules:
- Be civil
- No spam posting
- Keep posts on-topic
- No trolling
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is there anything that blocks all that other stuff, too?
There's no way to "block" it, as it's components that are inherent to how the web works. If you have a screen, it has a size, and if you go to a website, it can tell what size it is, for example. However, you can obfuscate or normalize some things.
Your best bet would be using something like the Tor browser (or Mullvad browser if you also use Mullvad VPN and don't want to deal with all the baggage the Tor network has), since it can limit your screen size so EVERYONE using the Tor browser has the exact same size "screen" to any website you visit, thus eliminating that as a data point, and all the Tor browsers are also running the same browser engine, going through the same overall network, etc:
https://support.torproject.org/tor-browser/features/fingerprinting-protections/
But at the end of the day, there's no way to reliably block all of it. The internet just relies on a lot of different things, and even a couple consistent data points can identify you. Hell, even using a VPN identifies you as "person using a VPN" vs just "person using the internet without a VPN", which is one more data point that could be correlated with the others.
So we need a new internet then?
A "new internet" wouldn't really fix this.
For example, if a site wants to display a page, it NEEDS to know how wide your screen is, otherwise the page will just look fucked up because everything will either be so wide it's past your screen's width, or so short it's a narrow bar in the middle.
Same goes for if a site wants to display certain rendered content. It can't do that without using some form of rendering engine like WebGL (and a "new internet" would still need some kind of engine to have that kind of rendered elements, even if it wasn't WebGL specifically). Your exact, specific hardware, current program utilization, and minute differences in power usage will ALWAYS produce some form of unique fingerprint. You can use extensions like CanvasBlocker to help with this, but it's not a guarantee and will break some rendering functionality. Then, the fact your browser blocks these functions is another data point that could track you. The lack of something is just as identifiable as having something as a data point.
Essentially, you can't have the features of the web without also making it known to a site that your browser supports (or actively doesn't support) those features. Even a "new internet" or entirely different set of browser and web frameworks wouldn't remove fingerprinting, it would just mean fingerprinting is done by whatever new methods now exist.
Even if you as a person simply type a given way, you can be identified by your typing styles. For example, I tend to use both "simply" and "for example" a lot more than other people, as you literally just saw. If you tend to use the internet around a given time, your time zone can be inferred. Unless you want technology that fully rewrites everything you say in a standard, robotic tone 100% of the time, and also delays some of your web requests by 12 hours to throw off time fingerprinting, you can't avoid that.
Try https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ and it'll give you a good sense of how many different things could fingerprint you. If you want to block ads, a site can know you block them. If you want to stay logged into ANY website after you close a tab, it'll know you save cookies, etc.
As someone else mentioned, legal protections are best here, as the largest actors that use these fingerprinting techniques are usually corporate, legally registered entities that run ad networks, and if fingerprinting as a concept can't be "blocked", then people's legal right to do so is your next best option.
Make the site send everything and the device determine what to use.
Yes, or atthe very least laws that forbid fingerprinting outright.