from Hacker News

Test browser for web tracking – EFF

by _cnhi on 11/5/23, 8:31 PM with 24 comments

  • by syx on 11/5/23, 10:01 PM

    It's scary how much information browsers give out for free, I wish I could use a browser that completely blocks and limits fingerprinting but nowadays I can barely watch YouTube or completing an online purchase flow with ad-blockers enabled

  • by einpoklum on 11/5/23, 9:22 PM

    TIL about a combination of supposedly innocuous, non-unique information my browser is sending out which, _in combination_, may identify me uniquely, or close-to-uniquely.

    My test results say:

    > Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 187,426 tested in the past 45 days. > > Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 17.52 bits of identifying information.

    ... and that's _at least_. It might be double that or more if all the information I'm sending out is orthogonal.

  • by qweqwe14 on 11/6/23, 12:16 AM

    Remember that trying to make a browser like Chromium or Firefox hard to fingerprint is harder than it seems.

    There's a lot of stuff you need to change, including fonts, screen resolution, system memory, user agent details (some browsers also add Sec-CH-UA strings), timezone, along with things like WebGL fingerprinting etc

    It's also worth noting that you can sometimes actually make yourself more fingerprintable by not properly hiding something, like changing your UA in HTTP requests but not in JavaScript as well. If a website detects such a "quirk", it would be able to fingerprint you with a lot more precision.

    TL;DR If you really want to stay anonymous and not worry about fingerprinting and trackers — use Tor Browser. It was specifically designed so that everyone has the same fingerprint, and has things like letterboxing to hide resolution etc. It's unlikely you'd be able to do a better job than Tor Browser by modifying your own browser.

  • by jakebasile on 11/6/23, 4:30 AM

    Using MS Edge on Linux really helped make my user agent unique.

  • by rkta on 11/6/23, 12:23 PM

      Our tests indicate that you have you have strong protection against Web tracking.

  Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 191,640 tested in the past 45 days.

  User Agent
  w3m/0.5.3+git20230718
  Bits of identifying information: 17.55
  One in x browsers have this value: 191640.0
    So I have strong protection by being basically unique? Not sure what this means.

  • by nabla9 on 11/5/23, 8:36 PM

    >Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 11.02 bits of identifying information.

  • by krackers on 11/5/23, 10:41 PM

    Javascript disabled and the result page doesn't even load. Does that mean I win?