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Comment by zbjornson | Hacker News Reader

From the Reddit comments: apparently this is false, the "leak" is just showing FF's defaults.

Maybe, but panopticlick is still able to fingerprint me to the point where I'm unique.... over 17 bits of identity in my browser (means you can identify me in a pool of up to 2^17th people).

Try it yourself.

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

(click "Test me" then "show full results"

I'm skeptical about that calculation. Went there with Safari on iOS, and it also showed 17 bits.

There's a few means of fingerprinting which are pretty much impossible to protect against, most obviously what fonts you have installed, which in combination with user agent and screen-size actually gets you a heckuva long way with fingerprinting.

Hopefully we can try and vastly reduce the leakage from navigator.plugins, but that might be hard to do without breaking the web, sadly.

I wish they would show the rarest fonts, so that I could contemplate their removal.

The problem I have with panopticlick is that it does not show you recommendations how to fix things.

Check the one in x browsers have this value column for large numbers.

In my case, for example, it says that roughly 1 in 6 browsers (of those tested by them, I suppose) have JS disabled as I do, so I don't stand out too much. However, my user agent string is 1 out of 100 and HTTP accept headers are unique among all 140k browsers they tested, apparently due to the unusual language preference settings I once made.

You are overstating the power of the fingerprint. It's only 2^17 if every bit of your entropy is random between you and other users of the browser. Likely many of those bits have very common settings shared by many users.

yes, and no. In practice this really only works well in browsers on residential machine. For browsers on corporate networks, many times they are configured exactly the same so many browsers behind a corp firewall have the same exact fingerprint.

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