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Comment by gregw134 | Hacker News Reader

In practice IP address is the most important component of browser fingerprinting. Browser fingerprinting can tell advertisers things like: person x has a 2011 MacBook Pro, is running Firefox, and has installed these 3 plugins. If that person visits a coffeeshop, clears their cookies, then revisits the same coffeeshop they will be easy to identify because they're linked by an IP address and a fairly unique configuration. Once you take IP address and city out of the equation browser fingerprinting becomes much harder, because the chances that someone else in the world has the same configuration becomes much higher.

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> Once you take IP address and city out of the equation browser fingerprinting becomes much harder

That's not true, see all the values that can be used to fingerprint a browser: https://fpcentral.tbb.torproject.org/fp https://browserprint.info https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#finge...

There is also Panopticlick

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

My only complaint is that if you have canvas fingerprint randomization turned on it still counts as unique.

> My only complaint is that if you have canvas fingerprint randomization turned on it still counts as unique.

It's not a good idea to randomize it, see the Tor Browser design document for more details https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#finge...

I was referring to WebGL and Canvas fingerprinting there, which the document seems to be in favor of, although they return a single value instead of a randomized value--presumably so all TOR browsers will look the same and muddy the data.

At any rate, a randomized canvas or WebGL fingerprint shouldn't be very useful for tracking a particular browser.

Read the "Strategies for Defense: Randomization versus Uniformity" part.

Most of their drawbacks to randomization apply to uniformity too, other than sites changing behavior due to your randomization. Uniformity has the big drawback of making it apparent that you're using the Tor browser, which is a red flag in some cases. At the very least it invites extra scrutiny. It's a strange design decision in my opinion to announce to loudly that a visitor is using the Tor browser when they presumably want to attract as little attention as possible.

And https://amiunique.org/

Is browser fingerprinting without IP address really feasible, given that 80% of users use a smartphone, which is always fullsize and usually hasn’t any plugins?

Just look at phone browser's User agent and you will be up for a surprise.

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