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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the top brass at alphabet ever worry that their trillion dollar empire is based on fragile foundations like web audio fingerprinting, etc.

that sure would keep me up at night.

obviously, i know google does more, but it seems like a large chunk of their revenue must be dependent on shady technical tricks like these working.

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They realized it was a risk so they built their own browser to have more control. And it worked. Only now, users are wising up and moving to Firefox.

Is firefox less fingerprintable?

I'm not an expert, but I'm running Firefox Nightly for exactly that reason.

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protectio...

It looks like the related feature is now in the regular release.

What's your user agent like? I would imagine there are not many Nightly users out there.

Still there are a lot of information in your user-agent and metadata (OS version, platform, screen size, timezone, and more).

Firefox has been putting a lot of attention to this area. https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/how-to-block-fingerprinting...

Seems to be, according to the creators of nothingprivate.ml: [1]

[1]: https://github.com/gautamkrishnar/nothing-private/blob/maste...

Not at all. In many ways since firefox has such a smaller market share you are significantly easier to identify than average.

This makes little sense. If the data collection capabilities are more restricted, how would one be easier to identify? Firefox has a significant market share still.

The absence of a data point is still an identifiable data point

Want to advertise a product aimed at digital privacy concerned people? Just push it at those you can not fingerprint..

firefox's charter allows for taking action against the interest of google. Chrome doesn't.

No meaningful fraction of users is moving to Firefox [1] [2]. I wish this was the case, but it sure is not.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#...

[2] https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx

If Firefox is blocking trackers by default, how will you know if more are using it now?

They don't have to worry because they control the browser too, and so those tricks will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

Which is why one of several things should happen. The first option is that there be legal requirements to adhere to public standards if you are a content distributor. And that any standards compliant client side software be allowed to use the service. In some areas we're in a world where your telephone carrier sells you your telephone, e.g. twitter, apple's imessage, etc.

Other options would be that if you are a content distribution company, e.g. youtube, google, facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. then you cannot have any control of the client side applications that consume the content. Trustbusting would come into play here.

Or legal obligations to follow a user's desire not to be tracked with real criminal fines and jail time applied to executives, managers, and developers who failed to follow the law.

What kind of legal requirement can thwart a multinational corporation? The UN cannot enforce any laws, the only supra-national entity with this power is the EU (see GDPR).

It's easier to just use Firefox with uBlock Origin, Cookie AutoDelete, etc etc.

The kind in which FBI agents show up at the homes of executives, board members, and senior management at 5:00am in the morning with guns and warrants.

Individual legal requirements in each jurisdiction.

They have a pretty big moat around their business.

If you want to buy advertising online you're probably gonna end up dealing with them either directly or indirectly.

the internet is already a shady hack that only usually works

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