alt Hacker NewsHow? How would a browser "know" what classifies as finger printing? Literally every piece of the engine is used for finger printing.
It can be mitigated, a bit, but I don't see how browsers can win that battle.
Finger printing is a lost battle in my opinion, unless we drastically reduce what a web engine can do (like Tor does).
Replies
bigbuppo • today at 4:28 PM
Just assume any site using javascript is using it for nefarious purposes.
I feel like there are two levels of fingerprinting here, and a lot of the confusion is downstream of not properly distinguishing them:
There's the kind that tries to find out what browser vendor, OS, and sometimes hardware you use, and the kind that tries to identify you across visits, unrelated origins etc.
I agree that the former is probably inherently impossible to avoid to a large extent, but the latter is both a bigger privacy issue and at least in theory possible to prevent.