this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
87 points (98.9% liked)

Privacy

43352 readers
988 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

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Damn... I guess the next idea is going offline for good

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SteveCC@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Back in the day there were apps that generated phony web searches to obfuscate your real searches. Seems like there could be tools to mess around and change browser fingerprints periodically. No?

[–] jimi_henrik@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It could be done on the browser level (maybe it's something browsers like LibreWolf do), however, it would break sites that require the fingerprints to be the same for "security reasons" which may or may not be a legitimate claim.

You could say "well, I'm not going to use that particular website then", but the problem is that there are less and less websites that don't require these technologies to function properly.

[–] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Can you give an example of one of those websites?

[–] jimi_henrik@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Off the top of my head, no. What I do remember is that I couldn't use Librewolf as my daily browser because I had trouble using every other website. Might be an exaggeration, and it could have been due to other factors, not just resisting fingerprinting.

I've just come across this article: https://kevinboone.me/fingerprinting.html

The author describes the situation pretty well:

you enable fingerprinting resistance in Firefox, or use Librewolf, you’ll immediately encounter oddities. Most obviously, every time you open a new browser window, it will be the same size. Resizing the window may have odd results, as the browser will try to constrain certain screen elements to common size multiples. In addition, you won’t be able to change the theme.

You’ll probably find yourself facing more ‘CAPTCHA’ and similar identity challenges, because your browser will be unknown to the server. Websites don’t do this out of spite: hacking and fraud are rife on the Internet, and the operators of web-based services are rightly paranoid about client behaviour.

You’ll likely find that some websites just don’t work properly, in many small ways: wrong colours, misplaced text, that kind of thing. I’ve found these issues to be irritations rather than show-stoppers, but you might discover otherwise.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Already done, see: https://github.com/uazo/cromite

When I go to the fingerprint test, a bunch of the values like canvas resolution and timezone are randomized.

...Not everything, though.

[–] PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Interesting... Tor, Mullvad, and other secure browsers, go to the exact opposite approach, though... they try to make everyone look the same so they can't tell you apart across IPs

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Yeah, exactly.

Cromite's explicit focus is, literally, antifingerprinting. With the goal of breaking cross site tracking I guess.

A more accurate goal for Tor/Mullvad is anonymizing, e.g. “blending in with the crowd.”

It’s like radically changing your clothes every day vs wearing super incognito stuff. Different means, each more optimal for different aspects of security/privacy.

[–] RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 days ago

And Canvas Blocker (which only optionally blocks but randomizes them). But Firefox has that built-in now; canvas fingerprinting should be pretty much useless there.

[–] pumpkin_spice@lemmy.today 1 points 4 days ago

There is a browser extension called Chameleon that will spoof a fair amount of data, but after testing it against one of those fingerprint test sites, it looks like it doesn't/can't spoof everything.