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0 pointskelnos5y ago0 comments

Does changing things often also help? Like, if there was a way to set things up so the browser would randomly change (on every request, or maybe every N minutes) bits of your user-agent, font list, screen resolution, etc., would that make it harder for sites to track you?

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welfare5y ago

The rate of change is of course an important factor, but some things like the order of how you installed fonts (which depends on the order you installed the software that fonts came with) or the plugins you have installed in your browser are still going to be constant.

What we saw was that people tried to spoof their UA only made it more unique. (E.g. your UA says Internet Explorer but you have Chrome specific plugins). Or even worse if you have a completely unique User Agent.

autoexec5y ago

As long as you're spoofing your fingerprint info (you can randomly change things like fonts, video cards, battery life, plugins etc) it doesn't matter how unique you are because every time you visit the site you'll be unique just like everyone else who is either a first time visitor or does the same. That seems way more effective than trying to hide in a "crowd" when even the smallest consistent deviation in an ever growing and changing list of potential flags will get you tracked 100% of the time.

debaserab25y ago

Couldn't the frequency of profile information itself be considered a uniquely identifying attribute? Couple that with something that's harder to change on every request (such as IP address) and I imagine you can confidently build a profile out of that.

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shock5y ago

There are extensions for Firefox that do this. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24851721.

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