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Comment by ryacko | Hacker News Reader

Virtual machines have the same virtualized graphics drivers, if everyone used virtual machines for browsing and deleted cookies and cache, web tracking would be restrict to IP-based.

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There are still several bits of data, like plugin support, touch support, platform, language, screen size, and timezone, that have to be actively manipulated if you want to reduce the likelihood of unique tracking.

are there any browsers that obscure these properties to sites?

Not that I know of -- there are just browsers that don't send out some stuff because they don't have the capability to detect it. You could do some more header-stripping with extensions and proxies, but in the end, like with cookies, this is stuff that a website might need to actually work properly.

The TOR browser if probably your best bet for this, even if you don't use TOR to browse.

Yes, but it is trivial to distinguish usage of Tor browser as commonly distributed and Tor browser in TAILS, by default one comes with an additional plug-in.

To do this well, you have to take special care with how exactly you obscure them. If your browser refuses to report those values, or sends junk values, then you might actually make the problem worse. It's the internet version of this: https://xkcd.com/1105/

Firefox has various privacy.resistFingerprinting preferences that can be flipped by extensions (or manually). Expect some sites to break though.

Edit: Oh, apparently there's built-in UI now: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/how-to-block-fingerprinting...

Yes. And using a VPN in a dedicated VM isolates activity well from the host machine and ISP uplink. There's still the risk that VPN providers will share information with adversaries. And so it's better to use nested VPN chains, which distributes over multiple providers.

The matter of virtual graphics drivers cuts both ways, however. Multiple VMs in a host that use the same virtual graphics driver have the same WebGL fingerprint. So if you want multiple fully compartmentalized VMs on a given host, they must use different virtual graphics drivers. That is, Windows vs macOS vs Debian family vs vs Red Hat family vs BSD family etc.

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