AceSLS

You're absolutely right with this. I consider the fines a way from the state to get their share of these companies cake. Sadly they don't really care they're breaking laws

Mate thx for the wall post, I did learn a lot.

You are in fact an expert even if there's people you look up to. Keep sharing and keep being awesome.

Oh wow, I really didn't expect such a kind response. I appreciate it, a lot actually. Now I know it was 100% worth it to write this 30 minute essay :D

Glad to help you mate and thank you

You are in fact an expert even if there's people you look up to

I don't wanna say you're right/wrong with this. Although I definitely agree that it's always a matter of perspective

I heard about generating unique IDs from harvesting PC data since the days that Adobe flash version were pretty telling, but no idea browsers today leaked so much semi identifying info.

Yeah, it's honestly scary. These huge tracking companies can easily tell who you are, where you live, with whom and also deeply analyze your psyche and psychological state. That's why I went so deep into the privacy rabbit hole

It's also really scary that most people are okay with this

Glassic "do as I say, not as I do". Fucking hypocrites everywhere

Thank you so much for such a great write-up

Don't worry, I kinda nerd out over this so it was fun to share some of my knowledge

What field are you in?

Nothing specific sadly, as I messed up school because I didn't care enough. I started learning to program at 11 years old though, got into reverse engineering by 12 and so much more stuff by now because it's all so fascinating I just can't stop researching and messing arround with things

Also, do you find CreepJS more powerful than Fingerprint.com?

Haven't seen that one yet, I'll play arround with it the next time I'm at my PC

Edit: It's not, my android setup was enough to fool it automatically. CreepJS is insane though, it even kept track of me on Tor!

My guess? This is just PR from their politicians to say "they are saving the country" or whatever bullshit without actually doing anything useful

My guess? They're trying to suck up to Google

Well, this is a way to vast topic to explain everything here but I'll try and summarize the most important things:

Let me first explain how websites are able to "fingerprint" you: It's basically just collecting as much data as possible about your device. Simple things like your browsers size (in pixels), your screen size, your CPU's core count an many, many more. Having all this data makes it possible for websites to create a profile that only matches one of your specific devices (world wide!). Some websites/fingerprinters even go as far as scanning your local network for other devices, which could even tell them where you live, with whom etc. This wouldn' be such a big deal if every website had their own database, but almost every page uses ads from Amazon, Meta or Google which makes these companies able to reliably track most of your internet usage even across different devices

So fingerprinters can be very intrusive nowadays, the best way to be anonymous is for everyone to share the same fingerprint which is what the tor browser tries to attempt. Obviously this needs everyone to conform to some predefined norms to work, otherwise you'll become an outlier which can be tracked again

Tor browser sadly is very slow and by definition not very customizable, so I chose to forsake it in favor of Librewolf in combination with uBlock Origin in Strict Mode, all filterlists and all privacy settings enabled. Additionally I use JShelter to restrict websites Javascript usage and spoof some of the data which can be fingerprinted. Also for Android I use Firefox with some settings from the Arkenfox user.js (Librewolf uses this by default, I mostly use DNS over TLS and Resist Fingerprinting) and Firefox's own Enhanced Tracking Protection in Strict mode. Additionally I like LibRedirect to access Reddit when I need to without having to login.

This setup stops most fingerprinters from even being loaded, those that still get loaded won't run most of the time. It also sadly doesn't work very well with pages behind Cloudflare, so you sadly need to (temporarily) disable some protections to get arround cloudflares captcha (or alternatively delete the webpages cookies each time you request another page from the same domain, this can be automated with addons/Firefox)

Keep in mind though that my setup might be considered pretty overkill by most and that privacy is a spectrum. It's possible to block all tracking, but that would make almost the whole web unusable so keep that in mind. Your goal should be to limit the data that can be harvested from you to an acceptable degree, not to eliminate it. Most of the time this is a tradeoff of convenience vs privacy

If you wanna learn more look arround uBlock Origin Wiki, the Arkenfox user.js Wiki and the JShelter webpage

Additionally here's some websites to test your overall fingerprintability:

• Browserleaks (My favorite, as it explains most things it shows you)
• Cover your tracks: Let's you look at your fingerprint generated by real tracking companies, mine is unique but changes every browser session (restarting my browser/wiping the pages cookies)
• CreepJS: Strongest fingerpriner I have found to date, almost impossible to fool. Goes as far as knowing when your browser lies about some things and much more!
• IPLeak: Some more identifiable information about your ip address and DNS settings

Shoutout to LibreJS as well, sadly it breaks wayyy to many websites without doing endless tweaking for me to consider it usable and also LocalCDN

Also to finish this I should tell you that I'm by no means an expert and that you should do your own research. Having a semi random fingerprint can itself be a trackable vector but atleast I feel safe enough doing it this way

Feel free to ask more if something's unclear/you want to know some more about privacy outside of your browser

... and then copy that into an encrypted cloud drive.

If you care about privacy you should encrypt the files first and then upload it to the cloud

They can try to block crawlers all they want

They will not succeed without restricting access to Reddit to an unusable degree, since crawlers can be coded to imitate real users close enough. Combine that with enough proxies and they can't do jack shit

Also you could get arround the Referer header quite easily via redirects (unless Reddit went ahead and used a Whitelist for those, which again would be a very stupid decision) and some more methods

AdBlock doesn't do shit about advanced fingerprinters

Have a look at CreepJS

Only way I found to circumnvent it is by using JShelter with WebWorkers removed

This is the same cat and mouse game hackers have been doing with game-/anticheat developers since multiplayer games became a thing

Are people still cheating? Yes

So unless google manages to pull of their device certification fuckery for PCs it will never work out in their favor

That's what Early Access is about, right? And it's not like other fuckers who release in EA and then just abandon ship after getting paid/releasing some minor patches for an unfinished game and call it "full release" (looking at The Forest for example)

For gaming PDS is king for stable frametimes and fast response times

Bore is close second

EEVDF is very good too

I also hope you're compiling with llvm and full lto for maximum snappiness