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 it even possible to protect yourself from fingerprinting? (kbin.run)

submitted 4 months ago by strawberry@kbin.run to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Even though i have Proton VPN blocking trackers and use firefox with arkenfox EFF always says my browser has a unique fingerprint. Same with Mullvad browser and Tor. When I switched Tor to "Safer" it said near unique fingerprint, and only when i switched it to safest did it say i am protected from fingerprinting

from my results id guess that it has no fingerprit thanks to no javascript, but 90% of websites are useless without js

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[–] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

always says my browser has a unique fingerprint.

That's mysterious! It's hard to entirely smudge away your digital fingerprint, but getting 100% unique match makes me think something important in your setup might be missing.

Does it say why?

Do you get the same result in a "Private Browsing" session?

Are your cookies set to clear automatically?

If you're allowing 3rd party cookies, you're going to have a unique fingerprint 100% of the time. That would certainly do it.

I can't think of another reason you would get 100% unique match over and over, though.

Are you running nightly releases of your browsers? That shouldn't get 100%, but could if you're unlucky. Or a big pack for browser plugins that love to announce themselves? I'm grasping at straws now.

Edit: You can press F12, while in your browser, and find a tab called 'Network' to see details of what your browser is sending out about you. Pay particular attention to 'headers' and 'cookies'. If those are too informative, it gives you a unique fingerprint. 99.99% of everyone has a unique digital fingerprint. But some basic techniques, studiously applied, should take you out of that pool.

Source: Websites have no idea who I am a lot of the time, generally when I choose. I'm clever and well informed, but I'm really just doing the same stuff you find in most short online guides to privacy.