this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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Wow nice. Any opinions on how these fingerprinting evaluators compare?
CreepJS:
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs
EFF’s Cover Your Tracks:
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
Am I Unique?:
https://amiunique.org
Sad a pretty stock iPhone that’s blocking via some filterlists and using iCloud Private Relay (a “VPN”) is so detectable! Should be so many browsers appearing similar but there’s always this & that that mean I’m unique.
They renamed panopticlick to cover your tracks? It was such a good name!
Just tried amiunique.org and got this...
"Yes! You are unique among the 2561164 fingerprints in our entire dataset."
So much for using VPN and "hardened" Mull browser 😅
Isn’t it disappointing :(
It really makes it feel like we're all just wasting time here on a futile effort trying to get digital privacy. Clearly the steps I've taken make absolutely no fucking difference, so it's not really worth the hassle TBH.
Haven't used amiunique but the EFF one I have seen people criticize because it only checks your uniqueness among people who opted in to take the test, so the results can be highly skewed.
The results aren't going to be that skewed. They operate on a simple principle. There are many features available on a modern web browser with a high degree of variability. Even not having a feature is itself a piece of a fingerprint. The combination of those many, many features is going to produce a high degree of uniqueness for almost any browser.
I wasn't trying to debate how the uniqueness is calculated, you're absolutely right on that, and other sites like creepjs do the same, but I think where the eff site is a tad misleading is in how it presents their "just how unique AM I" part of the results, because they only have their own collected data to compare that against.
Sadly I think even disabling JS entirely would take away so much "blending in" that it still wouldn't be hard to uniquely fingerprint a user without it. Even CSS (without JS) and standard HTML tags like "picture" can be used to fingerprint now.
Right. I guess there's also a difference between wanting to be as anonymous as possible and wanting to not be tracked too much by some sites.
In some browser profiles I do block JS completely for a few reasons.
For other use cases I prefer Tor browser without any added extensions.