Privacy

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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.

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Is brave the only browser with fingerprint randomization? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I use brave for this reason.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (14 children)

You don't want a randomised fingerprint, as that is relatively unique among a sea of fingerprints [1]. What you want is a fingerprint that's as similar to everyone else (generic) as possible; that's what Firefox's resist fingerprinting setting aims to do, and what the Tor browser does.

[1] There are many values you can't change, so the randomisation of the ones you can change could end up making you more unique ... think of it like having your language set to french but are based in the USA — that language setting can't uniquely identify the French in france, but will stick out like a sore thumb if set in shitsville Idaho. It's likely the same if you use firefox but have your user agent set to chrome; that's more rare and unique than not changing the user agent at all.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (8 children)

But isn't randomization supposed to give you a different unique fingerprint each time? So yes, you would be unique and easily tracked but only until your fingerprint changes

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

So what's the benefit of this over blending in each time?

[–] stifle867 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The benefit is that it's much easier to maintain and also increases privacy over the "blending in" approach. With trying to make your fingerprint similar to others, there are always going to be things that you miss that do actually make you uniquely identifiable. Certain things also aren't practical to "blend".

Think about a real life analogy. If you try and blend in with a crowd, even if you do it really well, a sufficiently sophisticated observer will still be able to spot you.

With a randomisation strategy you acknowledge that you will never be able to perfectly blend in and thus allow yourself to stand out. Trackers can build up a profile using that fingerprint. But as soon as your fingerprint changes you are completely unique again.

If you are in a crowd an observer can track you, but next time you appear you appear as someone completely different and thus lose the tail.