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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

What does it mean when i load the test, and it says i'm unique, and then i go back five minutes later without changing anything and it says i'm still unique?

are they tracking that i've run the test before, verifying that i'm me, and telling me i'm still unique, or is my fingerprint differing between two subsequent tests?

also, i'm suspicious about some of these values - only 0.13% of people have a querty keyboard layout? Only 7% of tests have no gyroscope? That doesn't sound right.

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The number which seemed strangest to me is that my up-to-date pixel 3a phone has a user agent shared with only 0.01% of browsers.

Up to date Chrome Pixel 4 here, same. I'm really the only Pixel 4 that ran this?

Since users of evergreen browsers will have frequently changing version number strings, the history of snapshots of these fingerprints is time sensitive. This serves to artificially inflate the uniqueness, as an identical device using the same evergreen browser 1 month, or 2 week ago, will not match you now, but would match if they revistited with their now updated browser.

To be useful, fingerprinting techniques need to somehow be robust against always increasing version numbers of evergreen browsers in ways that this website is not.

that doesn't sound too far out of whack to me, considering the user-agent string changes every time your OS version and your browser version increment.

Why would the most recent version Google makes available to my Pixel 3a phone be different from the most recent version Google makes available to anyone else?

It wouldn't be, they're almost certainly doing something wrong on the back end. I sent identical requests on multiple IPs spaced out over some time, and each one of them returned as being "unique". Even though the e.g. UA values were in fact the same. I suspect some kind of aggressive dedupe of things that look too similar, or some such.

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