Hacker News Reader

Yes, I reduced my plugins count in firefox to slightly decrease my uniqueness. piling on additional tracking prevention addons means getting tracked more.

View on HN

Simply using Firefox is a problem in that regard. I think most recent number I saw for Firefox usage was 1%.

Yes, that's true. I think Firefox now tries to hide itself by sending a false user agent? Everything is a trade-off though... using a version of firefox that's closer to stock is probably helping a tiny bit. Or maybe it's not, since Firefox wants people to use plugins (and for some reason, doesn't warn of the dingerprinting danger).

Mine currently says Firefox in it. You can override it without a plugin in the about:config setting general.useragent.override.

I would expect that any reasonably sophisticated fingerprinting system would not rely primarily on the useragent, and agree that anything that isn't stock only serves to distinguish you further.

The absence of things can be as profound as their presence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com