logoalt Hacker News

brainwad • today at 11:46 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Per coveryourtracks.eff.org, just my HTTP headers leak 18.46 bits of information, which seems to be the most the tool can report? Presumably most of that entropy comes from my language settings (en-AU,en;q=0.9,de-CH;q=0.8,de;q=0.7), so the only way to be not fingerprintable is to give up on smart localisation.

If people have a problem with fingerprinting, they need to focus on making it illegal to trade data tied to fingerprints, not trying to make users all look the same (we aren't!).


Replies

boomlinde • today at 12:12 PM

RFC 3282 allows for the exclusion of the quality value, in which case the languages are just given in priority order. Removing that will shave some entropy off.

I have a hard time figuring out why quality values are even included for Accept-Language. They either have one of the preferred values, or they don't.

➕ show 1 reply
paulnpace • today at 1:27 PM

Apparently, I have to enable JavaScript to receive a rating.