this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
48 points (98.0% liked)

Privacy

32083 readers
561 users here now

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hello!

Ever since I've seen the screenshot of permissions that the Threads app requires, I've been thinking that it would be a great idea if you could have an app that would give them the permission, but kept feeding it random and bullshit data.

This could extend to other fingerprinting tools on the web - I can make my browser have limited fingerprinting, but as far as I know, it's usually static. Using letterboxing will set your pixel size to a common value, and privacy focused browsers are using constant User Agent that includes everything.

But that's not going to help too much - I want my fingerprint to be random, and totally wrong. Feed them unusable data, something that not only isn't useful for them - but also actively sabotages their analytics. Pair that with a VPN, and now they have no way how to track you across sites, and also get a lot of bullshit data.

Another great thing would be an Adblock extension that not only hides every ad, but also click on it. Multiple times. Sure, it would be giving money to the websites you visit (which may be good), but it will also cost advertisers who pay for clicks (and will probably get you banned anyway).

I'm assuming that nothing like that exists, but I suppose that forking UBlock or forking LibreWolf could work, and just adding a Random here and there into their anti-fingerprinting code could maybe not be so hard.

top 7 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Mikina 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Ooh, nice! This is exactly what I was looking for.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with Librewolf, which I guess has hardcoded some tracking options - even after I disabled Enhanced Tracking Protections, I'm still at 0 clicked adds even though I tried really hard to visit ad infested sites :D Oh well, I'll see if I can do something about it, because this is a concept I really support.

EDIT: Ok, I was just really bad at finding sites with ads, for some reason :D

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Fitgirl repack site, le go

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I wonder if this could end up being counterintuitive? A random / BS fingerprint likely looks a lot different than most real fingerprints, so it might end up making you stand out even more.

[–] Mikina 9 points 1 year ago

Another thing that came to my mind is - I wouldn't mind running a few bots that do this, exploiting the analytics of a company by just running in the background and skewing their statistics. So, if a bot like that exists, I'm all for that. Even if it would mean running selenium all day.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is this thing: https://trackthis.link/. It's a bit limited but the principle is kind of similar

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Looks interesting! I'll give it a try. Thanks!