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edit: sorry, accidentally submitted early

So what. Removing one of the largest sources entropy available for fingerprinting users is important. We shouldn't maintain the terrible long-term effects[1] of tracking everything just to help you have an easier time debugging.

[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/shoshana-zuboff-q-and...



Does it really provide that much entropy? Maybe back in the days when browsers didn’t auto-update, but intuitively it should only provide about four bits at most (os: Android iOS macOS windows, browser: chrome safari edge ie ff) except for a few rare users who don’t stay up to date or choose a weird browser (and those folks probably are a little confused about how privacy works).


ohhhhh you betcha.

https://amiunique.org/

i ran this on my work laptop (windows 10 / firefox - mostly default settings). the "details" tab shows a full breakdown of each fingerprinting component with a "similarity ratio" (percentage of fingerprints that share the same value).

every entry is 20% or greater, most of them around 50% except for timezone (4%), canvas (1%), and user agent (0.12%).

so, yeah, user agents are still the largest source of entropy by a wide margin for fingerprinting scripts.


I suspect this is just stale data. I can’t think why the most recent version of a browser would put me at one in a thousand.




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