this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Browser fingerprinting is nasty and easy. There are ways to push back but it's still awful.
I believe that firefox is one if the few who has at least some sort of protection against it. But you should always use different browser profiles for anything you do online at least on computer and especially if you use vpn.
Wait Firefox sends fingerprint info?
Why is there not an open source browser that doesn’t send this shit?
Firefox does not "send" it, fingerprinting is done by tagging your hardware configuration from various values and create a unique key from that - independent of being logged in or any cookies - which can be used to track you. Things like browser & device user agent, browser window size, feature support (to determine browser version), etc. All of which are passively gathered by anything you could send a request to. There are ways to reduce this that Firefox and others do (such as reducing unique values in user agent, etc) but they're not opting in to some privacy invading reporting mechanism.
But the “various values” are sent, like you mention user agent, etc. I wonder if it makes sense to have a browser that doesn’t send all of that.
That's the tricky part. If you just don't send anything then they'll use THAT information to profile you, because no one else is doing that.
Also it can cause the page not to load properly.
So what most browsers do is spoof the information such that every user of that browser is sending the same information, when possible, regardless of whether it's accurate.