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Comment by delta1 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't seem so, visiting Panopticlick[0] on my unmodified Safari/iPhone7/iOS 10.3.3 gives "your browser has a nearly unique fingerprint"

[0]https://panopticlick.eff.org/

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So, panopticlick marks down my browser because it doesn't unblock third parties that promise to honour "Do not track".

In what way is this bad? (Yes, I have third party cookies blocked. No, I'm not unblocking them.)

It's bad in a sense that you're possible to identify uniquely by the advertisers.

Do not track is snake oil anyway...

The more things you do that aren't like what everyone else does, the easier it is to single you out from the combination of those choices.

Being on an iPhone will however reduce most of those bits to 0. For example any iPhone 8 with iOS11 will share the same screen resolution, fonts, user agent and so on. They talk about this in their methodology, however do not give the actual bits in their results, only that you have 'more than 19'

I got the same thing. When I look at the fingerprint details though, it's not clear why it should be "nearly unique". Of the things listed there, there's not much that's customizable, mostly just time zone, locale, DNT, and if cookies are enabled. That said, it also has "Hash of canvas fingerprint", which apparently has a lot of bits, but I have no idea what information that's actually extracting. Similarly "Hash of WebGL fingerprint".

I did try this on iOS 11, which they probably don't have much data for yet and would explain some of the unique-ness, but you said iOS 10.3.3 which is much less new.

Maybe iPhone users just don't try panopticlick very much?

Ditto on iOS 11 with Safari. In Firefox I get just unique, in Safari it is “nearly unique”.

I don't know how well Panopticlick would do for scoring Safari 11, as it runs all its tests within a few seconds. Some of Safari's new behaviour around third and first party cookies only kick in after 24 hours, or 30 days.

I’m golden on iOS 11.0.0

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