this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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Browser Fingerprinting And Why VPNs Won’t Make You Anonymous (hackaday.com)
submitted 4 days ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
99 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.

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[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Please understand that browser extensions make you more easy to track. I used to be under the same assumption, but uBO is as far as you should go. fingerprints include your extensions.

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

My thinking is that most of the fingerprinting is happening by third parties, and where it’s the website operators themselves I’m not super concerned about being fingerprinted.

[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Look at the uBO trackers on each site and you'll br surprised how often Google comes up.

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

From their domain that I’ve already blocked with DNS? Or are you talking about first-party scripts calling Google (which I’ve also seen though much more rare)?

In any case I block those too.

[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Google tag manager, which would be first party scripts now.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That depends on whether your browser exposes them, and if/how they affect your fingerprint. If you go to deviceinfo.me it will show you what your browser is exposing.

[–] GreenShimada@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah, there's also the covermytracks.eff.org and amiunique.org and https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/index.html which is my favorite