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Comment by konha | Hacker News Reader

I just tested my iPhone with the EFF tool [0]. Seems unique-ish. I use an adblocker and safari for browsing with default settings.

> Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors tested in the past 45 days, only one in 32014.4 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

[0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

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The EFF tool is provably false. For one, it doesn't get enough traffic so it's not representative in any way shape or form of a website that would use fingerprinting.

But it also doesn't pass the sniff test. It tells me I'm unique. One of 185k. Let's break down that number. I'm in the PST time zone. There ~40 million people in the PST time zone. Divided by 185k is 216. They're basically claiming there are 216 iPhone 13 Pro in all of California + Oregon + Washington + British Columbia.

Bullshit!

It's basically fake news. The EFF should know better than to exaggerate with hyperbole. It might be true that almost no one visits https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/, but site that actually gets traffic is also a sight where it'd be closer to unique in 1 of 10.

You could also try creepjs https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/.

For me, running the iOS 16.3 developer beta seems to have been what made my iPhone 'unique' among the ones tested on that site.

EFF's site is wrong.

What makes you confident of that?

Take an iPhone on the site and it’ll still call it unique, despite there being basically no identifying information listed in the report it gives you.

EFF don’t say they know who you are, rather how unique your device appears. This is a problem because if you appear very unique, only if one site knows your identity, everyone can potentially know it.

I understand that. An iPhone should should not appear as unique.

According to Apple's marketing. Yet here we are.

No, this is according to the report that EFF generates. Have you tried looking at it? What on that list lets you identify the device?

And yet... It does.

Buy 2 supposedly identical iphones. Take both to the site. Compare their information.

When you generate a report they tell you which bits of your device were unique. For an iPhone running the latest iOS there is nothing in that list that leaks a significant number of bits.

That's my point. Do it on 2 iphones and compare the information. You'll have your answer then.

If you're confident they're wrong then please spell it out for us. What bits do they claim are unique, and why are they wrong?

My point is they don’t claim any of the bits are unique (all of the individual things are very common) and still someone end up at an answer that is “unique”.

That site doesn't generally have sufficient recent data, it's essentially saying device fingerprint is rare compared with data from older software versions.

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