Slashdot Mirror
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."
I haven't seen a /. effect for a long time.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Google serves my computer ads for mens watches, it serves my wifes computer, on the same NAT, (the same PC, same screen resolution) ads for shoes. Both have cookies blocked and flash is disabled by default. Mine also blocks lots of google sites, yet I have yet to find a way to block doubleclick. Our browsers are both set to tell sites to "do no track". Neither of us uses Google for search these days, switching to Duck Duck Go.
So the fingerprinting is enough for Google to send us personalized adverts.
Now if someone can tell me the full list of domains I need to block to prevent DoubleClick (also from Google) from serving ads, I'd appreciate it.
Standard Mozilla behaviour last time this question came up is to include a list of fonts that your browser can display; I don't know whether other browsers do the same, or if they've changed it, but it's the kind of "feature" that hopelessly breaks your chances of non-uniqueness if you've ever installed fonts.
My work laptop has a font that's the Official Corporate-Branded font for $DAYJOB's corporate logo. Almost every Windows machine at my company has that (at least, every physical machine and the virtual machines running on the hosted virtual desktop cloud; there may be some lab machines that don't, and maybe some contractors, etc.) You might work for a smaller company that does the same. In my case, I've installed all sorts of other random fonts, either to see what they looked like, or simply because back in the 80s of course you wanted Elvish and Dwarvish fonts on your computer, or because I wanted a better monospaced programming font than the default MS one or Courier New.
Lots of other things leak information as well (cookies, etc.), but fonts are a quick and dirty way around identifying people who block those.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
GIven most of the data is what's reported by a browser, why don't browsers filter the data?
Especially if "Do Not Track" is set to on - why don't they limit the data to send back?
Fonts - Microsoft released 6 fonts for the web over a decade ago - just report those 6 across all platforms and maybe a few standard system ones (you can get this from the User-Agent anyways). Make it whitelist of fonts.
Sure, some data is gathered through plugins, but I thought many are now click-to-run so you can't get that data unless you specifically run those plugins.
Is there a reason why browsers like Firefox return everything?
The problem is not in fonts (on non-embedded there's no such thing as too many good fonts!), but in letting a random webpage poke that deeply into your system.
The message "No Flash or Java fonts detected" suggests who the culprits are. Flash belongs behind FlashBlock, Java belongs in /dev/null.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It's not the excessive tracking you should be afraid of. What you should worry about is the usage of incomplete data.
As has been covered on slashdot before NSA kills people based on metadata
Now add that together with some accidental killing of a person with the same name
A Reprieve team investigating on the ground in Pakistan turned up what it believes to be a confirmed case of mistaken identity. Someone with the same name as a terror suspect on the Obama administration’s “kill list” was killed on the third attempt by US drones.
What this tells me is that what I really should worry about is to accidentally having metadata that correlates with someone that the government wants dead.
But I wonder why my browser needs to provide details about the plugins I have installed to any website I visit. What kind of legitimate use could that have?
Sites recover the plugin list to see if you support whatever content they want to send you. If you don't have a certain plugin the site can fallback to some other way of displaying the information or it can refuse to do anything. For example, trying Flash to diplay a video then falling back to html5.
Is it useful ?
Somewhat, albeit less and less with html5. Also, there's many plugins sites don't need to know about, as for example a pdf plugin. Some plugins should be totally transparent because they don't interact with the site.
Is it bad for anonymity? Yes, it's terrible.
Your understanding of their last statement is mistaken. The 1 over 11099 has nothing to do with the above statistics. It only says that of the 11099 browser tested, there are only 1 with the union of the above elements.
You're spot on, that's exactly what it says.
How big a set is, is irrelevant when considering its union with one or multiple other sets.
However, what the statistics do tell you is which of those parameters is more or less common with the ensemble. Eliminating a rarely occurring parameter could move you to a more common set intersection, making you thus less traceable. But deducing the union probability from the set statistics is not trivial, if possible at all without further constraints.
We're looking into putting in a recommendation system to help users improve their anonymity.
But I am wondering if 11099 trials can be considered significant in this case. There are looking at 6 or more parameters which have countless possible values.
It's sufficient for us to do quite a bit of analyses on the data and to possibly implement and provide the recommendation system. The data is however highly skewed towards geeks and towards user's in France (a.k.a french geeks!).
Disclaimer: a couple of colleagues and I created amiunique.org to get some data to understand fingerprinting better. It's a small student project but we feel there's potential. We were not ready for so many people to take an interest :)