• Ulrich@feddit.org
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    3 days ago

    I mean it doesn’t hurt but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually block fingerprinting, it blocks domains known to collect and track your activity. The entire web is run on Google domains so that would be nearly impossible to block.

    The crazy part about fingerprinting is that if you block the fingerprint data, they use that block to fingerprint you. That’s why the main strategy is to “blend in”.

    • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 days ago

      The crazy part about fingerprinting is that if you block the fingerprint data, they use that block to fingerprint you. That’s why the main strategy is to “blend in”.

      So, essentially the best way to actually resist fingerprinting would be to spoof the results to look more common - for example when I checked amiunique.org one of the most unique elements was my font list. But for 99% of sites you could spoof a font list that has the most common fonts (which you have) and no others and that would make you “blend in” without harming functionality. Barring a handful of specific sites that rely on having a special font, that might need to be set as exceptions.

      • Ulrich@feddit.org
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        2 days ago

        No, the best way is to randomly vary fingerprinting data, which is exactly what some browsers do.

        Font list is just one of a hundred different identifying data points so just changing that alone won’t do much.

        • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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          2 days ago

          I wasn’t suggesting it as “font list and you’re done”. I was using it as an example because it’s one where I’m apparently really unusual.

          I would think you’d basically want to spoof all known fingerprinting metrics to be whatever is the most common and doesn’t break compatibility with the actual setup too much. Randomizing them seems way more likely to break a ton of sites, but inconsistently, which seems like a bad solution.

          I mean hypothetically you could also set up exceptions for specific sites that need different answers for specific fields, essentially telling the site whatever it wants to hear to work but that’s going to be a lot of ongoing work.