Sandboxing with randomisation is what we need.
Like a VM or a container to launch a browser. A canvas fingerprint needs to be different everytime it's calculated.
Like a VM or a container to launch a browser. A canvas fingerprint needs to be different everytime it's calculated.
Already I have to use another browser to use games or other 3D content because I have WebGL disabled in Firefox, and for 2d stuff the resistFingerprinting option reduces timer accuracy, which messes with game loop timing and makes the game totally unplayable. Making audio and video even harder to use is not good.
The only solution is to not allow this stuff to happen in the first place by using a permissions system. Adding more permissions popups is bad, so permission needs to be implicitly allowed by the user. Autoplay is a good example of this, calls to play() are blocked unless the call is being made in response to a click handler. Permissions for really recording audio/video through a webcam/mic also work well.
What you can do is require that the hardware produce bit-identical output for given input no matter how it's actually implemented, a bit like how HTML5 exactly defines rendering for any stream of input characters nowadays. Sure, this level of exactness might impose a performance cost, but it would improve privacy.
OTOH, you still have timing fingerprinting, so maybe you just can't win.
It's part of the reason why I get excited about toolkits like unity that remove the direct hardware interaction, but so far the limitations they impose always have come with serious costs as well.
One group of "bad guys" are the ones who want to track what you're doing even after you've cleared your cookies or track you across different domains or different apps. I would argue that this group is the smaller group, but browsers have been taking actions to make their jobs harder, including the "Facebook fence" that Firefox implemented.
There's a second group, which is the cybercriminals (or maybe just grey-market). Think Russian bot farms and purchase fraud bots, but also the guys who sell clicks and followers and rankings, and the ticketmaster bots and black friday bots and such. Those guys do their business by creating thousands or millions of fake accounts, and then funneling their transactions through them. They generally use scripts and cloud farms (sometimes even physical device farms). So app makers and websites need a way to detect when they're being attacked by one of those guys, and the way they do it, is more and more, through fingerprinting.
So every step browser and OS makers take to make the first group of "bad guys" jobs harder also makes the second group of "bad guys" jobs easier, because it makes it easier for them to pretend to be legitimate users.
There are massive amounts of jail sentences, international incidents (probably including potential wars), murders, divorces, and destroyed relationships in those silos just waiting to come out.
Not sure if it randomizes things like audio or canvas fingerprints, though.
Whonix is nice. It’s kind of painful to use, but if you need anonymity then it seems to be best in class.