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There are two ways to defeat fingerprinting: 1) Be common: have your data match what others are sending 2) Be unique on every page request: scramble your data

Browsers in category (2) are not trackable, even though they appear to be fingerprintable. Each page request is a different fingerprint.

What is unclear from the article is whether the studies mentioned (EFF, INRIA) considered that and tested that. Does anyone know? Because privacy does not require non-unique fingerprints, it just requires untrackability.




Are there any readily-available browser plugins (or whatever) that implement (2)?


Firefox has two about:Config settings, one stops canvas fingerprinting, the other notifies.

Other settings stop giving out a list of plugins or fonts. And e.g. unlock or umatriz can rotate your user agent.

It’s not perfect, but with a few tweaks Firefox is much much harder to fingerprint - though IPv6 tends to undo all of that because many providers assign a prefix per customer which will never change and can be used by anyone to correlate.


How common is the setup those settings put you in, though? Are you more or less unique in that bin?





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