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Comment by Fokamul | Hacker News Reader

Please, anyone from EU (US is doomed rofl) create a petition to ban browser-fingerprinting in EU, across all existing browsers.

I'm not good at creating petitions but can happily sign it. Also with stop killing games and anti-chat control.

I can imagine this can get a traction, if it's explained in youtube video to "normal" people.

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A better solution would be to make webgl, webgpu and (especially) webrtc have some sort of prompt before they can be in any way used in that fashion, but this will absolutely destroy web ux Windows Vista style.

You mean the "Accept Cookies" banner that has become a complete joke? Pass

I think he means browser permissions, for example when browsers want notify or record your mic theres a permission check something similar for webgl.

Fun Fact: When Cookies were introduced into Netscape, you got a browser permission prompt. Then browser vendors set it to allow by default.

And then legislation required those consent boxes back, so everyone built their own, instead of demanding that the default should be changed back.

It's about explicitly deciding to allow certain capabilities on a per-website basis. No major browser allows defense-in-depth via fine-grained website permissions.

Even simply changing the user agent was sabotaged at Firefox, and choosing one user agent per domain is wishful thinking.

This is actually illegal under GDPR.

And then the gatekeepers like Cloudflare will say "please hit accept in order to verify your browser and access this site".

You literally can't get rid of it without introducing government issued ID to buy any scarce freely accessible items

Which is why it's very likely to happen, especially in the EU.

Fingerprinting is just an implementation, banning it will just drive these companies to invent new tricks. That's why the GDPR doesn't specify any technical tracking methods, whether you're using cookies or fingerprinting or a camera drone looking at the user's screen, tracking without consent or good reason is banned.

I doubt politicians care much about fingerprinting, though. They're more afraid of actual businesses getting attacked by bots than they are about Linux users with weird setups not being able to access some websites.

a. Accept All

b. Accept Only Necessary Fingerprinting

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