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Comment by tokyodude | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually curious how useful fingerprinting is. One the one hand maybe your average enthusiast has a unique fingerprint. On the other every model of iPad/iPhone on the same OS version should have the same fingerprint as every other of the same model/OS.

Also

>> when will you enforce a no third party cookie by default? > > When it can be done without breaking too many users' day-to-day browsing.

Doesn't Safari do this already? Isn't that proof that millions of users (every iPhone, iPad, and greater than 30% of all mac users) are having no real issues using the web with that in place?

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> On the other every model of iPad/iPhone on the same OS version should have the same fingerprint

Not quite. For example, they might be on different networks, have different zoom levels set, etc.

> Doesn't Safari do this already?

Last I checked, Safari "blocks" (not quite; it's double-keying, not actually blocking) some third-party cookies, but not all. In particular, it doesn't block third-party cookies from sites you have visited in a first-party context. So for example it doesn't block Facebook or Google trackers.

The Firefox "no third party cookies" mode, which actually blocks all third-party cookies, is quite different from the Safari behavior...

Are you asking how useful fingerprinting is, or are you asking how effective it is?

For the former, any amount of fingerprinting lets ad companies make the case that their ads are better or worth more money. For the latter, the EFF Panopticlick research project seems to be pretty good at giving you an idea:

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

I don't have an iPad/iPhone etc. to test Safari with; seems like they'd be amongst the most homogeneous of devices. Perhaps someone with one of those devices could tell us if the EFF can uniquely identify their device. It was able to uniquely identify all of my devices.

The panopticlick site is hyperbole (or in other words poorly implemented). Since no one visits it it will tell you an iPhoneX in Los Angeles is 1 in a million. Their site doesn't take IP into account it's only the taking what it can get from the phone. Timezone for example and then all the normal fingerprints. And yet every iPhoneX is exactly the same. Calculate the penetration of iPhoneX and it should be more like 1 in 100 or 1 in 33 or even one in 20 not 1 in a million. It expires data which make sense but any site wanting to actually track you would need to be on popular sites. As such it would need a unique fingerprint. It won't get one for an iPhoneX which I'm just using as an example. you can choose any popular device.

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