Hacker News Reader

Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> having a unique fingerprint is bad, as it allows tracking of you by fingerprinting, without the need for cookies.

Correct.

FWIW (disclaimer: I'm the developer of StopTheMadness Pro, mentioned in the article) I just ran two tests in Mac Safari, with StopTheMadness Pro enabled and disabled, and the results were exactly the same each time: "at least 18.06 bits of identifying information". Alas, that's a unique fingerprint, but apparently my extension doesn't make anything worse. If you look at the detailed results, the identifiers are things like User-Agent, screen size, time zone, and language.

View on HN

Thank you for the extension. I’ve been a Pro user for quite a while now. I wish it existed for Linux as well, as I really miss it when I’m not on the Mac.

One relatively small complaint if you don’t mind me hijacking this thread. The update process could be a lot better! Especially on Firefox. I’m used to it now, so it’s become just a bit of an annoyance but the first few times were tense moments, and especially panic inducing a couple times when I was pressed for time and couldn’t use the browser before updating the extension.

In any case, it’s an awesome extension and I recommend it to others frequently!

I don't really trust the EFF site. I'm not trying to be an annoying contrarian but as far as I can tell it always reports a unique result and nobody has explained to me yet why a freshly set up iPhone should look unique to them. Everyone talks about canvas fingerprinting or whatever but I mean it is literally the same GPU and screen size and font stack and colorspace as a million other iPhones. What are they getting? My time zone, maybe? IP? What do I actually do to reduce the number of bits?

https://amiunique.org/ provides more detailed information about fingerprinting.

That site claims that the default user agent for the latest version of macOS buckets me into 0.01% of users. This seems very unlikely to me.

StopTheMadness is my favorite extension. So awesome thanks for making it!

That's the same amount of bits I got with every browser I tried (Safari, Chrome, Firefox). Not sure what the takeaway is, but at least for me, all browsers seem to leak roughly the same amount.

I got exactly 18.06 too, seems fishy.

(also, thanks for StopTheMadness Pro!)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com