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How Identifiable Are You On the Web?
An anonymous reader writes How identifiable are you on the web? This updated browser fingerprinting tool implements the current state of the art in browser fingerprinting techniques(including canvas fingerprinting) to show you how unique your browser is on the web.
Good food for thought when three-letter agencies talk about "mere metadata."
Always have been, and always will, for as long as light echos through space and time. But nobody really cares who I am. They know who I am, nevertheless.
I am the walrus.
Their sample size is 11-thousand. According to my results, 1-in-6 computers are running Linux!
This is absurd, unscientific to the extreme, fear-mongering.
In your example, based only on the statistics you provided, there were 11099x0.0109 or 120 people in the central time zone *in their sample*, which is the sample size of UTC-6 users.
Their data is useless.
In comparison, https://panopticlick.eff.org/i... has almost 5-million in their database. This is somewhat more helpful.
It seems to me that it would be simpler for Firefox (and other browsers) to just whitelist a default set of fonts and those are the only ones it uses regardless of what might be installed on the system on any site you are trying to limit tracking. (It can allow for web embedded fonts; it just won't load anything but the default set from the system.)
If MS wanted to do it for IE, they'd just have the non-default font set blocked for the "Internet Zone" and allowed for the "Trusted Zone" which should cover most intranet scenarios where they've got custom fonts.
I suppose an "exceptions" list could be managed separately as well if was really necessary; or it could be tied to the cookie exceptions list -- which would be logical from a "privacy reasoning" perspective... but counter-intuitive from the "why are local fonts not loading for this site just because i blocked cookies" perspective.
In any case the upshot is that any given version of any given browser on any given platform will have the same fonts available as any other instance of that version of that browser on that platform -- then "font profiling" adds nothing to the basic platform information they already had.