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53% Positive

Analyzed from 9350 words in the discussion.

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#browser#page#data#site#more#website#web#fingerprinting#don#information

Discussion (274 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

card_zeroabout 12 hours ago
* I'm not in that city.

* It's running a kind of Chrome on a kind of Linux, at a stretch.

* Nobody can infer when I work and when I sleep. That includes me.

* The recent, high-end display is the screen of a low-end tablet I bought in a supermarket five years ago.

* But yes, browser fingerprinting is annoying.

* Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?

cushabout 10 hours ago
The amount of fingerprinting this page reveals pales in comparison to what actually happens in the wild
jwallyabout 9 hours ago
its ease is also vastly inflated. If it was as simple as this site makes it out to be, companies like fingerprint.com don't exist.
shimmanabout 8 hours ago
Don't know about easy but their JS lib doing this is quite good:

https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs

Honestly surprised to see it licensed as MIT now too. It was something less permissive before. They aren't doing anything too crazy, more like being the first ones to be open about it.

I couldn't imagine what else companies like Google or Meta or TikTok can extract out of it that no one else can't. Integrations aren't exactly hard to make, quality is hard yes, but making half assed plumbing is sufficient too.

Those advertisers benefit from monopolistic markets with zero regulation while owning the platforms they sell advertising on that requires their explicit malware in order to use, what is unique about their finger printing versus what fingerprintjs provides?

BugsJustFindMeabout 11 hours ago
* That's the wrong battery percentage and the wrong charging status.

> Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?

It would probably still be low contrast garbage even if it did. :/

mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
The 100% charging readout is the desktop-with-no-battery phantom. I pushed a stricter filter for that earlier, you may be on a cached copy (try a hard refresh). On the light-mode call: the page detects your preference but doesn't honor it, intentionally. The irony being that the demo ignores the same signal it points out. I take the cost of the annoyance.
fragmedeabout 9 hours ago
Okay but it's really hard to read for those of us with old people eyes.
mystralineabout 11 hours ago
> It would probably still be low contrast garbage even if it did. :/

My guess this is LLM slop website generation. And they forgot to prompt to include high contrast text... And the site owner cant make the changes without a sloperator.

EchoReflectionabout 4 hours ago
yeah it told me I'm "in Los Angeles" but that's just the time zone I'm in. It also "thinks" that because I have two different languages as inputs that it has scored some kind of "gotcha", but I just happen to also frequently use a second language .

"English · Chinese Your browser’s primary language is English. It also carries Chinese. This tells us not just what language you speak, but often where you were raised, where you have lived, or who you live with. This is transmitted in the header of every HTTP request. It has been doing this for as long as you have used this browser."

No, the fact that I have English and Chinese as input languages does not tell it "where I was raised, where I have lived, or who I have lived with.". Might as well say "the fact that you're using a phone to look at the Internet tells reveals that you are someone who can access a phone to look at the Internet!". Yes, technologies interact with other technologies. That's how "technologies" work. Is it Orwellian? Yes. But is it more Orwellian than the surveillance states of Russia/China/North Korea. etc? We also can now find our phones/cars/devices that can share location, locate criminals by way of their online activity, record incidents that"need" to be recorded (like when ppl are committing crimes or when police officers need to be held accountable for their behavior). Catastrophizing about the "overreach" of tech is a cognitive choice. That all being said, it is good to be aware of what info our technologies "know" about us.

nozzlegearabout 7 hours ago
> I'm not in that city.

I'm using Apple's Private Relay VPN so it was hundreds of miles off. It's always interesting to see where websites or services think I'm located using their geolocation databases, but if I turn it off they can pinpoint me within a couple of miles. Thankfully almost nobody has ever blocked Apple's VPN, so I never have to turn it off.

> Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?

Seriously, I'm in my mid-30s but some of these dark mode sites make me feel mid-80s. I can't see shit on this site.

cobbautabout 8 hours ago
> I'm not in that city.

Same, it claims Brussels, but I'm in Antwerp. It also got my screen resolution wrong.

georgemcbayabout 9 hours ago
> I'm not in that city.

Same, it said Riverside but I'm in San Diego (about 100 miles away from Riverside).

Of course, its just using a geolocation database for the IP address and thus reporting the location of some switching center Verizon runs and not my actual location.

If you're trying to prove a point about privacy its probably best not to lead off with information that can be off by hundreds of miles while presenting the fact that it "knows" this information as being darkly ominous.

Presenting this information while being wrong probably does the opposite of the site's intent and gives some people a false sense of security because what real websites and apps track about you using digital fingerprinting is a lot more detailed, personalized and (usually) correct than what this website presents.

quietsegfaultabout 8 hours ago
> Nobody can infer when I work and when I sleep. That includes me.

Are you like /severed/ or something? Surely you can infer when you work and sleep from your experience living your life as you.

sgbealabout 8 hours ago
> Surely you can infer when you work and sleep from your experience living your life as you.

Not everybody has a schedule. Mine is essentially "eat when hungry, sleep when tired", and my sleep patterns more closely follow a 26-hour day than a 24-hour day.

yard2010about 5 hours ago
This is fascinating, please do tell more about it! How does it affect your mental health? How do you deal with times day and night are flipped? How does it affect your social life?
delichonabout 11 hours ago
It was much better for me.

* Your socks don't match anything in the room.

* The man you thought you killed in Tuscaloosa woke up and walked home an hour later and is now a chiropractor in Shreveport.

* Your daughter is pregnant by the kid who trims the hedges.

* Your dog is dreaming about the squirrel in the wood pile.

How does it know?

vitorfblimaabout 9 hours ago
This is all common knowledge, unfortunately.
noelsusmanabout 9 hours ago
I am once again asking privacy advocates to try sounding normal for once. Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything.
Unaiabout 5 hours ago
> You prefer dark interfaces — your operating system told us.

oOoOohh my settings worked as intended, spooky!

aucisson_masqueabout 5 hours ago
Agree, sending my language, if I use dark mode or time zones is all data that can be used to give me a better experience so I don’t mind.
mpalmerabout 9 hours ago
It's the usual terse LLM voice that makes everything sound dramatic. Nails on a chalkboard
downrightmikeabout 2 hours ago
That's what helped L figure out Kira was in Japan, and likely a student given the times of deaths, in Death Note. Ruled out 7.8 billion people in one step
warkdarriorabout 9 hours ago
> Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything.

But I am the only person in this timezone in the world. It uniquely identified me!

AlecSchuelerabout 7 hours ago
The claim was that a site could "infer when you sleep, when you work, and when you browse because you cannot sleep." Is that not true? I know that the timing of my HN comments tells a pretty clear story about my schedule having recently looked at a histogram.
karmakazeabout 10 hours ago
Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies. I looked for better websites, the EFF one[0] is informative.

My browser fingerprint was unique among the visitors in the past 45 days.

[0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

ifh-hnabout 10 hours ago
> Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking.

Gotta love Firefox with ublock origin in advanced mode, even without JavaScript disabled so the site worked.

capitainenemoabout 8 hours ago
uMatrix + NoScript personally (yes, seems silly, but I find NoScript's UI more convenient for script toggling, while liking uMatrix's fine grained controls)

Did you enable firefox resist fingerprinting? Also maybe letterboxing, which I think is not enabled by that flag by default, and also helps with CSS fingerprinting.

ifh-hnabout 7 hours ago
I used to use umatrix, preferred it to ublock origin advanced mode. However, isn't umatrix unsupported?
eikenberryabout 9 hours ago
Did you specifically re-enable javascript? Ublock origin on medium mode blocks all the tracking javascript and I'd think advanced would follow the same basic starting point.
ifh-hnabout 7 hours ago
Yeah, didn't work without it.
m4ck_about 10 hours ago
If i run that (or similar sites) multiple times, shouldn't I like.. not be unique each time?
tossandthrowabout 10 hours ago
At least in Europe the gdpr still counts, even when you don't use cookies but fingerprinting.

So if you use this information you still need to disclose it and process data in accordance with the law.

Rygianabout 9 hours ago
In my case, the site reports "The technique is called browser fingerprinting. It is legal everywhere."

It is definitely not legal in Europe, when used to track individual users. The consent pop-ups are not only about cookies.

internet2000about 10 hours ago
"It doesn't matter that the FUD isn't accurate" Hmm.
globalnodeabout 10 hours ago
id still prefer the information be inaccurate. since sites are rude enough to try and track me, the least i can do is feed them unique garbage.
kykatabout 8 hours ago
Visiting without JS: "With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops."

I find this hyper dramatic LLM language extremely off putting, but appreciate the signal that allows me to completely disregard it.

cortesoftabout 9 hours ago
Maybe it's just because I am old, or have worked on internet software for almost 30 years, but none of this seems surprising or even concerning?

Someone sets up a server that accepts connections to it and then someone sends a connection request to it.

There has been no agreement on anything, no expectations or rules established. No one forces the server to accept any connection request it gets, and no one forces someone to make a connection request to that server. What the server returns and what the client does with that are completely up to each side.

I feel like this agreement (or lack thereof?) works both ways. I don't think users should get mad if a website decides to use information about your connection request in anyway it chooses, but I also don't think a website should be able to get mad if I do whatever I want with the data it sends to me.

In other words, websites can choose to remember whatever they want about my IP address and my request details, and I can choose to do whatever I want with what they send back to me (i.e. I can block ads or refuse to make followup requests that the site tells me to make, and i can choose to display the response in whatever way i want to) I asked for data, they sent me data.

If I don't want them knowing stuff about me, I shouldn't send that stuff in my request. If they don't want me to have that data unless I also display ads, then they should make me agree to that before sending me the data.

Of course, I know in practice most people don't understand what their browsers are doing, and there aren't a ton of practical choices for people around what their browser sends, and the internet is no longer an optional thing for a lot of our lives. I also know that things like DDOS attacks and the like make a completely 'anything goes' setup impractical.

However, I still have this gut feeling that we shouldn't expect too much from either side when we make an internet request.

ryandrakeabout 7 hours ago
> Of course, I know in practice most people don't understand what their browsers are doing, and there aren't a ton of practical choices for people around what their browser sends, and the internet is no longer an optional thing for a lot of our lives.

This is the root problem. Your browser is supposed to be your agent. It's the User Agent, after all! It should be working on the user's behalf, users should understand what their browsers are doing, and browsers shouldn't be doing anything without the user understanding and affirmatively consenting to it. I should be the ultimate authority over what my browser sends, and browsers should make it trivial to exercise that authority.

In reality, the browser is Somebody Else's Agent. It's working for the web developer, giving him all sorts of things that make his life easier. And it's working for the advertiser, providing tracking clues and fingerprinting. And it's working for the browser developer, collecting metrics and telemetry and god knows what else for them to do god knows what with. But, it's not really working for me or on my behalf anymore, I'm just a passenger in the car.

EDIT: Understood that IP address is not something under the browser's control, and it's unfortunately necessary to reveal in order to connect to a web site. It's a terrible mis-feature that IP addresses (by default without a VPN) can be reliably mapped to countries, state/provinces, and sometimes even cities. This is a huge design flaw in how we hand out IPs. In a better world, having an IP address shouldn't reveal anything about someone's geographic location.

cortesoftabout 6 hours ago
I don’t think it is as simple as saying browsers are working for the web developer and advertisers.

All the features that allow web sites and ad companies to track and target ads are features that are primarily there to give functionality that makes the web a better experience for users. JavaScript allows websites that are better experiences than not having it. I know some people disagree, but I think they are either intentionally ignoring useful things or have a purity view of the web that doesn’t match most people.

ryandrakeabout 6 hours ago
I guess what I'm advocating for is that it should not be all-or-nothing, and it should not default-on:

Most web sites have no business knowing my time zone. Why are browsers offering it up? That should be gated on the user's permission.

Most web sites should not be able to determine what my screen resolution is, or what my operating system is. Browsers should also hold that back and only disclose it with the user's permission.

Most web sites should not by default have access to all the shit JS gives them access to. Battery Status, Web Audio, WebGL, Sensors, WebRTC, Geolocation, media devices (camera and mic), clipboard, local storage... All of these have uses, but should be behind individual, easy to access per-website preferences, and by default the site shouldn't even be able to query for their existence (which is enough to fingerprint), let alone call them. I shouldn't have to blanket turn off JavaScript to kill these things.

All a website needs to know about me, my browser, or my computing environment is I want to "GET /".

Obscurity4340about 6 hours ago
They dont need to collect your accelerometers information of your irl movements or your devices' automatic time zone stuff i dont think. That basically gives away you're using a VPN and makes it easier to fingerprint you
1-moreabout 8 hours ago
> You appear to be in Denver, United States. Your internet provider is Netskope Inc. We know this because your IP address — 163.xxx.xxx.32 — was the first thing your device sent us. We know the rest of it. We chose not to display it. Most pages would not have made that choice. We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did.

"We know the rest of it. We chose not to display it. Most pages would not have made that choice" this is written to frighten children maybe? Also that's not my internet provider. Maybe it's my ISPs upstream provider?

rolphabout 7 hours ago
there was a prank way back, that used simple html, css and javascript, to instruct the browser to display IP address, public, and local, popup a stream from the webcam, and place them among a crafted document intended to trigger i.e. troll people.

no data was cast to internet, it was all code executed with local user permissions to access the devices devices and logfiles displayed inline as "proof" that you are standing on stage with naught but your drawers.

people were at times moved into a panic and could be manipulated into making contact with malignant entities. there were casualties.

never underestimate the damage that can be caused by manipulating perceptions of the current situation,its not a joke, its handgun serious.

fjniabout 9 hours ago
Maybe it's because I'm idealistic in addition to being old, but I think a lot of this functionality was in fact added for explicit purposes.

A client sends the language header or the list of supported fonts not so that the server can "do whatever they want with this data." There is (or was) a real reason for it when we came up with these standards.

The fact that website providers, or more specifically ad-networks, have chosen to use these for other purposes is breaking that implicit agreement.

(edit) but you're probably right that i'm expecting too much.

cortesoftabout 8 hours ago
I don’t understand why that would be an implicit agreement, though? Why would I expect that the website would not try to figure out who I am?

They are free to remember whatever they want about my request… but I am also free to modify the request however I want, if I choose to randomize the list of fonts or choose to not send it or whatever.

applfanboysbgonabout 7 hours ago
> Why would I expect that the website would not try to figure out who I am?

For the same reason I expect my neighbor not to kill me or steal my shit. We live in a society, with societal expectations around behaviour. I, personally, would prefer not to live in an uncivilized jungle where the only rule is "do whatever you can get away with".

sixtyjabout 6 hours ago
Website is a good dog. But its owners don’t have to be good as they can re-sell data about you to someone else.

Some sites can have more than 1,000 partners - you can explore their intentions in cookies consent window.

kelnosabout 7 hours ago
> Why would I expect that the website would not try to figure out who I am?

Because doing so is creepy.

kelnosabout 7 hours ago
Sure, but I think some of the stuff it sends isn't necessary. A website doesn't need to know the list of fonts on my machine, for example.

Some of them are questionable: most websites do not need to know my time zone, but when a website can use that in a useful way related to its functionality, it would be annoying if the browser were to popup an allow/deny dialog, and even more annoying if I had to manually set it in the website's bespoke settings panel.

I'm not sure what the solution is here.

marcosdumayabout 6 hours ago
> A website doesn't need to know the list of fonts on my machine

Unless you disallow websites from choosing their fonts, that information is really hard to hide. Most likely impossible.

What you can do is standardize the list.

> most websites do not need to know my time zone

Almost anything with a form needs this.

Every information on that page is necessary for something common and desirable. It's not using any advanced fingerprinting that can be blocked.

jrumbutabout 8 hours ago
The location it chose was laughably inaccurate (and since I'm the kind of person who posts here I know why). Censoring the IP address was a little cheesy, but down at the bottom it gets better.

It knew how much my phone was charged and it made correct inferences about my device. It accurately read my gyroscope, how I interacted with the touch screen, and it demonstrated (not new knowledge to me but probably interesting to the general public) how these things could be used to identify you and also to make inferences about you (if you are sitting, standing, lying down, etc).

It starts slow but it got interesting.

footyabout 6 hours ago
I learned that either my phone's gyroscope is broken or my browser obfuscates it.

Still interesting, even if not surprising.

slgabout 8 hours ago
I think a lot of us old tech folks want to still believe in those techno-libertarian ideals of the old web. However, in order to do that we largely need to ignore the capitalistic and authoritarian ideals of the modern web.

Us not owing each other anything worked great in a prior era when people were largely correct in assuming most people were good actors. But as soon as the money and power of the internet became real, things started to turn more adversarial. The assumption of trust and lack of responsibility makes it easy for one side to take advantage of the goodwill of the other. And the technical and power imbalances inherit to the server-client nature of the web means that abuse is more likely to flow in one direction than the other.

jrumbutabout 7 hours ago
I agree entirely. Those of us old enough to have experienced those dreams are naturally going to mourn the loss of the Internet as a place for wild experimentation because we know so much good came from it and there isn't any true replacement.

But it's become clear that in the absence of governance, standards of behavior, and rules both explicit and implicit, the Internet has grown toward tyranny and automated exploitation rather than freedom.

We need to set some rules and expectations that people can rely on, otherwise rules will continue to be imposed on us.

gonzalohmabout 6 hours ago
One thing is using information about my connection like my IP and a different one is my browser exposing the angle that I'm holding my phone.

I should be able to expect some privacy from my device. What if my browser starts sending a picture of my front camera with every request, is that okay?

cortesoftabout 4 hours ago
No, that wouldn't be ok, but if my browser did that, I wouldn't be mad at the website for doing something with the data I sent them. I would be mad at my browser, not the web site.
xg15about 6 hours ago
I remember some users with phpBB signatures some 20 years ago that did the "I know where your IP address lives" trick. Yeah, a bit surprised this is still being done, only today not as some silly troll move in a forum but on some professionally designed website.
reddaloabout 5 hours ago
Yeah I totally remember people embedding an "image" which was in fact dinamically generated with PHP, showing the reader's IP or geolocation.
sixtyjabout 6 hours ago
I remember late 90s - we made a website that greeted incoming readers with message “Hey, you come from {ip address}.”

Today, it seems that websites track and collect much data as they have partnerships with 1,000 partners (see cookies consent window).

scotty79about 9 hours ago
Browser volunteering an angle at which I'm holding my phone is a bit surprising.
Matheus28about 9 hours ago
Why? Some web apps might want to present a different interface if you’re in landscape.
shimmanabout 8 hours ago
You don't need an angle for that. That is highly invasive and can be used to target unique individuals. Why not default to a pro-human oriented mindset rather than pro-corporation?
wtallisabout 8 hours ago
That's much more reliably conveyed by looking at the viewport dimensions.
pfortunyabout 9 hours ago
My students are essentially forced to use MS services. So... there is that.

So am I, come to think of it.

cortesoftabout 8 hours ago
That seems more of an issue with the school, though, rather than the actual web request. In this case, there IS a prior agreement between the school and MS, so there can be additional expectations about how that works.
shimmanabout 8 hours ago
I didn't know the browser made an agreement between myself and it. Here I am thinking that I am forced to use monopolistic tech because I a US citizen have zero say in the direction of technology in the country, that's decided by undemocratic financiers gambling with pension funds in SF. Silly me.
tardedmemeabout 6 hours ago
Missing the deforestation for the tree-trimmers? If it was only one or two websites blocking people it wouldn't be a problem.
brudgersabout 7 hours ago
Someone sets up a server that accepts connections to it and then someone sends a connection request to it.

My disappointment is not with websites. It is with browsers. They have continuously prioritized dark pattern support. They have consistently removed user control.

I mean it's not the websites that default to recording every keystroke, default to tracker persistence, default to phoning home with daily telemetry, etc.

When I first started using HN, I ran four very different browser engines. Now there's no real choice.

cortesoftabout 5 hours ago
Why isn't there choice anymore? Aren't all the major browsers open source?
nemothekidabout 7 hours ago
None of the information on the website I would argue is a dark pattern. The remote server knows my IP address? Yes that's how the web works.

The server knows my window's resolution? Well I think thats very useful information for the application to have for layouting.

You know what other application is recording my keystrokes right now? HackerNews. "recording keystrokes" is also known as "typing in a text box"

brudgersabout 6 hours ago
HN does not record your key strokes until and unless you click the reply link…and then only if recording your final edited comment counts as recording your keystrokes.

On the other hand, your browser might be recording each of your keystrokes just because it can and if your browser does, those keystrokes are not going to HN.

fragmedeabout 3 hours ago
There's a difference between HN getting the final text when you hit "reply" and a site using JavaScript to time how long it takes you to hit each individual key press and how many times you hit backspace or moved your mouse to switch to a different tab to look something up or if you made up some facts in the comment or if you used an extension like grammarly or anything else.
lucideerabout 11 hours ago
The website is pretty & the overdramatic copy is fun, but there's much better fingerprinting demos out there.

The number of data points shown here is low - there's plenty more it could be checking - & a good number of them seem to be wrong (it's only detecting one as explicitly "withheld" but I believe a few of them actually are, leading to garbled output).

Needs some QA.

InsideOutSantaabout 11 hours ago
The overdramatic tone is pretty funny. "You are in [wrong city]. We could send a team on ninjas to kill you right now, but we chose not to. You are welcome."
acid__about 9 hours ago
In short, another AI-generated slop project.

I've seen this exact UI style a dozen times now and it's always accompanied with tell-tale overly verbose, overly dramatic text.

pona-aabout 11 hours ago
A vibe-coded EFF Cover Your Tracks. The fact this made it to front-page is spookier than its contents
moritzwarhierabout 9 hours ago
exactly, it even looks like a page created by someone asked to "replicate this, non-obviously, add fancy landing page theme".

Fugly.

camillomillerabout 9 hours ago
Yes! By a user who’s 21 days old, has never commented and it’s not even following this thread as he has absolutely never replied and never will. Having these kind of submissions not flagged is killing hacker news
EricBettsabout 9 hours ago
I think at least they're following the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064959
serial_devabout 8 hours ago
I disagree, the discussion is still interesting to me. The page might be low quality AI slop (though it claims it’s not), I did find the discussion about it informative to a degree.
ebolyenabout 12 hours ago
There's really a lot more you can look at here. Lot's a prior art on super-cookies and fingerprinting:

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

https://amiunique.org/

nottorpabout 10 hours ago
Hmm interesting. I tried the EFF site and among other things it told me I'm on "MacIntel".

Gave me a scare, thought I'm still somehow running an x86 build of Firefox.

mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
Both linked in the Sources & Confessions modal at the bottom. Cover Your Tracks is the spiritual ancestor of this whole piece. amiunique is more rigorous; this is the editorial cousin.
cf100clunkabout 11 hours ago
Brutally dark site doesn't seem to show much to my eyes. No modal appearing at the bottom.
cf100clunkabout 12 hours ago
Another info leakage feedback tool:

https://www.ipleak.com/full-report/

mmh0000about 8 hours ago
Wow! Somebody with ChatGPT discovered the concept of browser headers, then for some odd reason made the verbiage really ... weird "We chose not to tell you"... okay...

Anyway, if you really want to know what your browser is sending:

https://browserleaks.com/

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Swizecabout 8 hours ago
I love that the very first thing it showed was wrong

> San Pablo, California, United States > You appear to be in San Pablo, United States. Your internet provider is AT&T Enterprises, LLC. We know this because your IP address — 108.xxx.xxx.233 — was the first thing your device sent us

I am in San Francisco. IPs are not a reliable location identifier and never have been. Especially on mobile. Thank you for coming to my ted talk

RHSeegerabout 11 hours ago
> We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did.

Bunk. You asked a geolocation api/service to map my ip address back to a location. You _did_ ask for my location, using my IP as a key. And my IP is pretty much required in order for communication on the internet to work (outside of using services to hide it, but then _they_ have your info instead).

ygjbabout 10 hours ago
Nah. The browser has a mechanism to request geolocation. This is the ask that was not performed. The user was not asked, which is the important piece.

If I have a dictionary, I don't have to ask the meaning of a word I hear from someone I am speaking to, I can look it up in the dictionary. I may infer an incorrect meaning because the word has multiple meanings or is a colloquialism.

If I need to clarify that inaccuracy, I need other data points (for example, the context of the conversation), or I can ask my conversational partner for clarification).

nozzlegearabout 7 hours ago
> Nah. The browser has a mechanism to request geolocation. This is the ask that was not performed. The user was not asked, which is the important piece.

The geolocation API requires prompting the user for permission before it can be used: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...

ygjbabout 6 hours ago
Yes, that would have tripped the prompt asking the user, which would have had explicit user acceptance or refusal. The point is you don't need consent to do a fuzzy match usibg other data in most jurisdictions.
cortesoftabout 9 hours ago
I think you are misreading this. It isn't saying they didn't ask ANYONE, they are saying they never asked YOU as a user for it.

Also, though, of COURSE your address arrived first... how else are they going to send back the data you are requesting?

mmoossabout 10 hours ago
> my IP is pretty much required in order for communication on the internet to work (outside of using services to hide it, but then _they_ have your info instead).

Tor and similar multi-hop proxies, depending on construction, supposedly can't match source to destination IPs.

amarantabout 9 hours ago
It has.. Shall we say tradeoffs.. In terms of latency mostly, but I suspect bandwidth is likely affected too
Advertisement
troyvitabout 11 hours ago
> Your graphics processor identified itself as or similar.

That checks out. I think what I have is similar to a graphics card but isn't quite.

wlesieutreabout 11 hours ago
My GPU identification is off by about a decade but it did get the brand right
Sohcahtoa82about 10 hours ago
Seriously. My laptop was manufactured last year, and the site identified it as a Radeon R9 200 series. That was a top-of-the-line GPU...back in 2014.
wlesieutreabout 9 hours ago
Same ID for mine. Are you running Firefox? Maybe that's a lie it tells to fingerprinters.
chrisweeklyabout 12 hours ago
I appreciate the intent here, so this is constructive feedback:

  - Some of the numbers are off, eg 
"Your browser allocated 39322 MB of storage to this page alone"

  - low contrast in dark mode makes text hard to read
mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
The 39 GB number is a bug. I was reading quota (browser allow-up-to ceiling) and calling it "allocated." Fixed; pushing now. Contrast is intentional but I hear you. not changing it but noted, and a cleaner reading mode is on the to-do later.
tophamabout 11 hours ago
Contrast is a violation of accessibility guidelines.
warkdarriorabout 9 hours ago
This site is already violating your privacy. Do you think they care about your accessibility needs?
nottorpabout 10 hours ago
An instant loading page without animations and more contrast would have been more fun.

The fact that it begins with my IP address reminds me of those dubious VPN ads.

City is wrong, I may speak English but it's not my native language.

As other people said, there are much better pages showing you your browser fingerprint.

mrguyoramaabout 9 hours ago
And like most people discussing these things, you entirely miss the point.

It doesn't matter whether you actually speak english natively or not, nobody cares about the actual values. Web sites don't actually care whether you have a robust font package in some way to discern whether you are a font hipster or something, they are just collecting signals.

What matters is that your physical machine and web browser combo report these values about the same way every single time they are probed, and that is used to reliably track YOU, uniquely, with great accuracy, with EVERYTHING you do on the internet, every site you visit, every mouse movement, every purchase linked back to you.

Everything.

The actual values don't have to match "reality" in any way. It's just about generating bits of signal about your setup.

nottorpabout 7 hours ago
> It doesn't matter whether you actually speak english natively or not

So don't you think presenting the info as it's a great uncovered secret and then getting it wrong will lead the layman to disbelieveing everything?

Of course, the other extreme is the EFF site that says "Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.33 bits of identifying information.".

There must be some middle ground to present this info.

IdiotSavageabout 11 hours ago
> Where you were before

> news.ycombinator.com

This has always bothered me the most. I disabled the 'Referer' header once, but it breaks many websites.

mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
The Referer header is the one that's hardest to opt out of cleanly, strip it at the network level and too many things break. Referrer-Policy lets the origin set the rule, but the visitor doesn't get to choose. There's a quiet move toward Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin as a sane default in modern browsers but it's still origin-dictated, not visitor-dictated.
pessimizerabout 9 hours ago
I strip/forge it with a old, probably outdated firefox extension (Referer Control.) But you still got news.ycombinator.com. How? I thought the extension was broken, but it's not.

That was actually my only surprise, everything else I was expecting.

edit: ignore this, looks like I just needed to save my preferences again. Thanks for showing me that I have been leaking my referer for some mysterious amount of time.

al_borlandabout 8 hours ago
It's interesting that this breaks things. When trying to link to an internal password vault at work it would always break. People would have to click the link on my site, then reload it to get the page to load. This wan an issue for years, across multiple versions and despite many people offering up ideas to help solve it. One day I thought maybe it was a referrer issue, so I had it open with noopener,noreferrer, and that fix it.

It seems odd that any site would require a user come from somewhere.

exe34about 9 hours ago
Hah I remember the picture of the scrotum.
skeritabout 10 hours ago
> We know this because your IP address was the first thing your device sent us.

First paragraph, and I don't like this wording already. It's as if "my device" has any choice in the matter.

And actually, it's the reverse! Often enough your own device does not know your _actual_ public IP address without asking some kind of public service to snitch on your internet connection.

carimuraabout 11 hours ago
Aren't LLMs smart enough to choose better color contrast by now?
nosioptarabout 6 hours ago
Not when they've been trained on low contrast garbage.
mrpopoabout 12 hours ago
Happy to say that my browser didn't tell anything that I didn't expect it to. It even identified my IP from a location 1000km away from me.

Firefox on Android with ublock

freedombenabout 12 hours ago
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it gives my exact GPU, but that was surprising to me. Just so everyone knows, its an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT and I paid way too much for it during the covid/crypto price explosion when they were sold out everywhere. Still a bit raw about that, but it is an excellent card on Linux (fedora)
dylan604about 12 hours ago
"Your graphics processor identified itself as or similar"

guess mine isn't such a specific model as yours. so I don't have a real GPU, i have something similar to a GPU??? did I get a knock off Alibaba version?

mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
Real bug. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" for the renderer string and my parser was grabbing the second half. Fixed; pushing in a minute. Your GPU is fine. Your browser is doing the right thing.
stusmallabout 12 hours ago
I got "or similar" from Firefox and exact make and model from chrome. Probably a browser issue and not a hardware issue.
mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
Confirmed. Firefox's privacy hardening returns "Mozilla, or similar" or just "Mozilla" as the renderer string. Chrome doesn't (yet). My parser was treating the Firefox string as if it were ANGLE format and grabbing the wrong half. Fixed.
dylan604about 12 hours ago
not regretting choice of browser at all
mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
The GPU string really is the spicy one combined with screen + fonts it's enough to single you out across most of the open web. The card itself is a tank.
2ndorderthoughtabout 11 hours ago
Yea that is a strong fingerprint. Especially if any of the other things were correct or someone has a way to model your behaviors. How long you scroll vs how often you type etc. and somehow that's still not enough for big tech and they need biometrics, photo IDs, etc.
mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
Yeah, the bottom counter on the page is meant to make exactly that point. Mouse movements, scroll velocity, tab switches, reading pauses are all features in modern fraud / "trust" scoring systems alongside the static fingerprint. Biometrics is the next layer, and it's already happening on the back of "passive" liveness detection most people never see.
ape4about 12 hours ago
Yeah the exact kind shouldn't matter - just the WebGL capabilities.
tgvabout 11 hours ago
It got mine quite wrong (Firefox).

The thing that bothered me is that browser are still sending the Referer info. I thought that was not supposed to work under https?

scragzabout 12 hours ago
you are using a Radeon RX 6900 XT on Fedora Linux. we know this because you admitted it in the previous comment.
simonbwabout 9 hours ago
It seems like they know I have an iPhone with dark mode enabled, that I speak English, and that I'm in the USA (but wrong city wrong state). I am kinda unimpressed, I'm pretty sure they can get a lot more info than that.
wincyabout 12 hours ago
My battery is at NaN%, the site is cool but it should probably change the text if I’m not actually exposing that information.

It got the city wrong but close to where I live. This stuff would be wildly wrong if I fired up my VPN. Although its annoying when I connected to a VPN to Steam it’ll often show my prices in Canadian dollars instead of USD.

freedombenabout 12 hours ago
Heh, my battery (which I don't have cause this is a desktop) is at 100% apparently
dylan604about 12 hours ago
Battery: kept back Your browser kept your battery level back. Firefox removed this API entirely in 2016, after researchers proved it could be used to track a visitor across websites without cookies, without consent. The API still exists in the specification. It was simply hidden — from you, and from any page that might ask after it.

Well, at least something positive from the shit I take for not sheepling my way through life using Chrome

llbbddabout 7 hours ago
I got this message and I'm on Chrome, on a laptop. I tested in the console on that site and was able to get the battery level though, so I'm pretty sure their check is just broken.
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looneysquashabout 7 hours ago
Would be nice if more people were focus on fixing these issues instead of just a bunch of "we already know", and making fun up the tone of the site.

Thanks op for reminding us of the privacy issues with our browsers. The EFF and others already told us, but the issues remain. Lets hope you're hear to stay and fight for our privacy alongside us.

mwheelzabout 7 hours ago
Thanks for that. The page isn't trying to tell anyone something they don't already know, it's trying to put it in front of the people who haven't been told. The bug reports today have been gold and the volume is meaningfully better for them.
aziaziaziabout 12 hours ago
> Your screen is 320 by 568 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display.

It’s been a long time my 2016’ iPhone as been called recent or high-end but I’ll take the compliment, thank-you.

chainingsolidabout 8 hours ago
Ya, I'm not running my Pinephone's display at x2 cause its a high end display on a $200 phone.....
Gualdrapoabout 12 hours ago
Text is so dim is really hard to read.
O1111OOOabout 11 hours ago
If you're on FF, this could be helpful for these kinds of sites (I use it all the time):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/site-color-ch...

D2OQZG8l5BI1S06about 3 hours ago
AI really has a problem picking proper fonts, this is barely readable...
nick49488171about 6 hours ago
The gyroscope and battery should not be getting exposed without permission. That seems unexpectedly invasive, and I'm in tech.

Also we should disable referrer field.

jameshartabout 10 hours ago
> Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique

The set of fonts available in stock iOS is hardly going to be unique now is it?

That it is even possible to install fonts onto iOS would be news to most users.

Multicompabout 12 hours ago
Mine told me my graphics card was "or similar" so my stock Firefox is doing at least okay.

While I still follow the general privacy first tenets, I have ended up backing off on some tools (noscript and librewolf) at the extremes of privacy because if every site is going to track everything by my IP or by my ASN or browser fingerprint, I do have a happy medium of being private enough while not being utterly broken in my browsing.

Roughly that looks like email aliases on demand via sieve rules, ublock origin with liberal use of filter lists, different handles and a password manager, frozen credit ratings, and Tailscale exit nodes or Mozilla(Mullvad) VPN for uncontrolled WiFi access points for my jnrootabke android device and mostly signal for comms.

I'm getting to old to be a privacy extreme enthusiast when all of my family side channels everything straight to Facebook, so this is the impure level of privacy I can sustain.

Milpotelabout 12 hours ago
Same for me, also the "screen" size is off (just shows window size), the location is off by hundreds of kilometres and other information is quite generic (battery level "kept back", small set of standard fonts available...).
ShabbyDooabout 7 hours ago
Access to the available font list might be useful for identifying devices likely issued by a particular organization. Unusual fonts that are part of an org's branding usually are installed as part of a standard device image. This allows employees to produce brand-compliant presentations, etc. I was an intern at GE in the mid-90's and we had a custom font with just one character defined - the "meatball" corporate logo.
aidanbeckabout 12 hours ago
Aside from the fingerprinting methods, the graphics processor string seems to be the most immediately personal data given up (other than location, which was incorrect for me). I could see sites tailoring ads around an assumed class, income, and level of digital literacy based on this data point alone.
moritzwarhierabout 9 hours ago
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

does the same or better, without AI regurgitation and a WordPress theme.

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kbigdelyshabout 6 hours ago
So if they can figure out whether I have an expensive laptop/computer based on my graphic card, then they can adjust the prices I see on the page (e.g.higher prices for game devs/players and lower prices for plumbers). Not fair.
coroboabout 11 hours ago
Dunno what it is with the wording but my brain started reading it in a bit of a "Hello Clarice" Hannibal Lecter style lol

>The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique — like a fingerprint made of letters

Is this one true? I've not made any changes to fonts on my phone that I know of, wouldn't it just be bog standard iPhone fonts?

Curiosity not challenge

Would be cool if you actually did track just to prove the point like "you've opened this page 6 times now, 2 of those were via VPN and one time was using the Firefox Focus browser. Have you found any flaws in the data yet?"

shepherdjerredabout 4 hours ago
How did you prompt Claude to be so paranoid but also bad at fingerprinting?

Of course the browser knows my IP and language. Nothing on this page is really surprising

mikeocoolabout 11 hours ago
As far as this website reports, I'm undistinguishable from most other Mac users in Brooklyn, New York. Seems like it's not actually highlighting the frightening aspects of fingerprint.
ygjbabout 10 hours ago
Yeah, your browser fingerprint might be a needle in a needlestack. You might not be able to distinguish one needle from another needle easily, but if you have enough needle samples you can start to identify what the needles are pointing at. Data aggregators collect enough pseudo-indistinguishable needles to be able to disambiguate and associate them with a known identity or cohort. For example, your mobile browser might be indistinguishable from most other Mac users in Brooklyn, but your mobile browser might be the only one running on a device from an IP address that regularly logs a meal in MyFitnessPal at that Starbucks wi-fi before making Apple Pay/Google Wallet purchase, hits the next 8 stops on the train before connecting to the same cell tower at the narrow window as you enter your office (telling on myself a bit, tho I am in Vancouver, not Brooklyn).

Span this across all of your movements and activities across multiple aggregators and it's a trail of movement through a fog of data that is fuzzy, but enough to identify you, or a small cohort of similar users.

binyuabout 7 hours ago
They forgot to add timing attack on images load time which can be used to tell if you visited X website.

https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2011/PAPERS/2011/paper010...

lights0123about 7 hours ago
Not since browsers started partitioning caches in 2020: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning/
binyuabout 5 hours ago
I don't think this protects from sidechannel/timing attacks applied to images load time completely.

Edit: Reading more thoroughly, probably it does to a great extent after all.

____tom____about 8 hours ago
I doubt the fonts on my iPhone identify me. As far as I know, they would be the fonts it came with. Or can apps install fonts?
mcintyre1994about 8 hours ago
> Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique

Is this actually true? Because I don’t even know if I have any control over this on iOS, and if I do then I’d guess almost nobody diverges from the default?

mwheelzabout 7 hours ago
Fair point, and you're right. On iOS the stock font set is essentially uniform across devices in the same OS version, so the "nearly unique" claim doesn't hold there. Just pushed a hedge: prose now distinguishes between desktop (where fonts accumulate via apps and OS over time, and the bundle is genuinely identifying) and iOS/Android (where it isn't, on its own). Combined with screen + GPU + language + timezone the iOS version still narrows the field, but the prose shouldn't overclaim. Thanks.
Aardwolfabout 9 hours ago
> You came here from news.ycombinator.com. Your browser told us the address of the page you were reading before this one. Every link you follow tells the destination where you were. The page you just left knows you left. This page knows where you came from. Neither was asked.

I thought this didn't work anymore and browsers left out the referer in the case of https, is that not so then?

CCoffieabout 9 hours ago
I believe you only lose the referer header when switching between http and https.
1vuio0pswjnm7about 11 hours ago
Perhaps this illustrates the ridiculous level to which website operators make assumptions about website visitors

This phenonemon is much older than "browser fingerprinting"

1vuio0pswjnm7about 9 hours ago
Opening this page in text-only browser, i.e., no Javascript, CSS, auto-loading resources, etc., it appears to contain zero information about the visitor. Not even an IP address

https://web.archive.org/web/20260508131253if_/https://sincey...

YeGoblynQueenneabout 6 hours ago
Huh? The user mwheelz seems to have been [dead]'d in the time this post has been on the front page. If I look at their comments page, those posted more than 46 minutes ago (at the time of writing) are normally visible and the rest are [dead].

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mwheelz

Mods, is there something we should know? Is there maybe a reason to stay away from the linked website?

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everyabout 7 hours ago
It seems to have a little trouble with lynx... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
nathanmillsabout 11 hours ago
You can't gaurentee any of this is fingerprintable without checking twice (i.e. give the user a unique url, then ask them to restart the browser and visit it). In privacy browsers like LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser this is almost all spoofed, save for things like the IP which needs to be hidden/changed independently of the browser.
mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
Correct on rigor. Proving a fingerprint requires the two-visit protocol you describe. The page doesn't actually compute a stable fingerprint or attempt to track returning visitors, it shows you the signals that go into one. The barcode at the bottom is deterministic from the data shown but isn't compared against anything stored. Sloppier than a real fingerprinting tool, by design.
culiabout 11 hours ago
Most of this is pretty standard stuff but one thing I did learn is some of the fingerprinting techniques I wouldn't've thought of. Like Mozilla/Apple not sharing GPU or battery information being used to confirm which browser I use even if I fake the User Agent String.
everdriveabout 8 hours ago
"With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops."

This is surely only partially true.

seydorabout 7 hours ago
I thought the referer was not available under https anymore
simonwabout 7 hours ago
Cute detail: if you switch to another tab and then back again it shows a banner at the top:

> You left for 6.3 seconds. We noticed.

pugworthyabout 9 hours ago
Trying this in Lynx I'm surprised it didn't at least get some information from me in the request headers. You don't need JavaScript to pull things out of them.
ramon156about 12 hours ago
Its mixing confidential info. For example, you know I'm connected from a location, but you do not know my precise location. I connected from a tower that is from Odido, but I am not paying Odido for a subscription.
mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
Right, IP-to-geo is approximate and gets a lot of cases wrong (yours among them). Most ad networks use it as a region/DMA hint, and not precise positioning. The point of including it isn't precision. It's that any location is more than nothing, and the visitor never opted in.
GMoromisatoabout 10 hours ago
Someone should do a demo where they take all the info from the browser and feed it to an LLM to describe the person as accurately as possible. I bet it would be 10x better than any horoscope.
deferredgrantabout 10 hours ago
Browsers are stuck between compatibility and privacy. Every bit of environment detail has some site that claims to need it, and every extra bit makes users easier to distinguish.
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yakkomajuriabout 12 hours ago
DuckDuckGo browser helped mask some stuff, but definitely a fair amount still goes through.

Annoyingly the web is becoming a bit more annoying to browse as a DuckDuckGo (mobile) and Brave (desktop) user. With a VPN on top it gets even worse.

yard2010about 5 hours ago
Tell me what kind of smell my last fart had. Now this will be scary.
Cider9986about 11 hours ago
I prefer https://fingerprint.com/demo

Terrible company-at least you know you are testing what is being used.

pixel_poppingabout 11 hours ago
What's terrible about them?
Cider9986about 10 hours ago
They track us around the web.
pixel_poppingabout 9 hours ago
But anybody knows (in tech I mean) that a browser client leak a lot of things and sustained tracking is easy even cross-browsers (and cross-devices too with more advanced techniques), including history (easy to know which websites were visited with timing analysis in loops and iteration), it falls on the responsibility of the user to achieve privacy, but it requires heavy sacrifices that frankly most users are not willing to do, fingerprint.com is really basic and doesn't go to a great length at all actually to track users (fortunately).

Reality is that most do not care about privacy (look at the number of Google users, even developers themselves who are completely aware of it and continue to "embrace" the mass tracking). There is also the mass brainwashing which is an issue where people that use VPNs think that they are anonymous and this is terrifying to think (thank you NordVPN non-sense, which also use Google Analytics which then correlate entire traffic later-on, what a joke).

byhemechiabout 1 hour ago
Unreadable and useless vibe coded shit. Submissions like this are why I've all but stopped using HN
LPisGoodabout 1 hour ago
I didn’t find it unreadable. It was pretty neat in my opinion.
byhemechi41 minutes ago
45% grey text on a 10% grey background set in a light serif font.
baddashabout 9 hours ago
pretty interesting but why's this website so dramatic, like it thinks it's making me uneasy and paranoid or something
efilifeabout 6 hours ago
Because it's AI slop. It's the same tone every time
internet2000about 10 hours ago
Yes, I'm on a MacBook Air in Eastern Time and I speak English. I'd have told the website that myself if they had asked it.
Ylpertnodiabout 9 hours ago
Eastern Time, USA, or closer to Bangladesh?
donatjabout 9 hours ago
The text legibility of the gray on black is a serious problem. My eyes aren't that bad but I can barely read this.
rectangabout 9 hours ago
My eyes aren't great and I had to pinch-zoom to read parts of this page.
amarcheschiabout 10 hours ago
You could have used show hn since you made it
flintabout 7 hours ago
Something attacked my computer. I shut the page, and some old one popped up. I shut it, and they popped up again I shut my browser, and Notepad++ was filling with <cr><lf> I closed Notepad++, closed every open app, and restarted.
tempodoxabout 11 hours ago
If the color scheme weren’t so atrocious, it would almost be possible to read what it says.
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superkuhabout 12 hours ago
With javascript off it just stalls at "reading" forever. There are certainly some viewport properties and other things it does know even without JS execution, but the mitigation is significant. And the page itself (the JS application) cannot act on that data or communicate it. Instead it has to be processed by some other application on the backend or wherever. Not in my browser by my computer.
Steve16384about 12 hours ago
I can't help feeling that if you're turning JS off, you might as well turn off your computer to protect your data.
dylan604about 11 hours ago
As an experiment, I made a small retail shop (< 30 products) that would use JS for modern style async/await calls, but would then use old school POSTs if JS was disabled with full page reloads on every POST. it sucked to dev and as UX, but it was possible to do. Had the non-JS POST style updates been any less annoying, it might have been viable. Nobody likes full reloads. They suck. JS can do nice things for UX. It's just that we can't have nice things because people suck
efreakabout 3 hours ago
That's what frames are for. Only reload the frame with the important data in it (total cost, list of products in cart) and point the category links in the page to open in the same frame as the shopping cart. You can even style the frame contents with the main page's stylesheet so it only needs to load a `$41.29` total if that's all that's changed.
andaiabout 12 hours ago
Nah, HTTP logs still leak my circadian rhythm.
MarsIronPIabout 11 hours ago
This site actually works just fine without JS.
MarkusQabout 12 hours ago
That's actually a fantastic idea!

Oh wait, no, I'm an e-addict. Drat! Curse this monkey!

reenorapabout 10 hours ago
How do we get our browser to stop sending all this information? It's really maddening.
al_borlandabout 8 hours ago
I tried it with a VPN running and in the Mullvad browser and it got all the big stuff wrong.

Where are you was sent to another location due to the VPN, this was all it really impacted. When you arrived was wrong because of the Mullvad browser, even without the VPN enabled it reports that I'm in Reykjavik, which I'm not. What you brought with you, it got the resolution wrong, as the browser locks itself to various resolutions to prevent this kind of fingerprinting. GPU and Battery both say "kept back", I assume this means it couldn't get anything, because when I run in Safari it says Apple GPU.

chainingsolidabout 8 hours ago
2/3 of the big browsers are open source, you could just change it this year! (Assuming your mobile device isn't from the former personal computer company turned status symbol manufacturer).

Harder problem is getting the economic system that relies on this information swapped out. Have fun when 99% of web doesn't 'work'.

sgarrityabout 11 hours ago
I'm not worried about my privacy. No one can read the dark text on that page anyhow.
mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
Update: I pushed two rounds of fixes for things people caught.

1. GPU "or similar" stranded prose. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" as the masked renderer string and my parser was grabbing the second half. Masked-GPU case now gets its own observation.

2. Desktop battery showing NaN/100%. Chromium reports a phantom 100%-charging battery on machines without one; my filter was too narrow. Stricter check, falls through to "kept back."

3. Storage quota of 39+ GB reading as implausible. Now expressed in GB, and the prose was reworded ("would let this page write up to" rather than "allocated to").

4. Screen size matching window size (Firefox letterboxing / Brave farbling). Page now names it: "your browser appears to be returning the viewport in place of the real screen — anti-fingerprinting at work."

5. "Recent, high-end display" being claimed on old retina devices (iPhone 5-class). Tightened the heuristic.

6. No-JS hangs at "reading." <noscript> block added.

Worth saying directly since it came up. The prose is hand-written. Each observation has a small set of templated registers and the code selects among them based on what the data returns. There is no LLM in the runtime path. AI helped me iterate on the spec like it does for most projects now. The sentences on the page are mine. If that's not the kind of work you're in the mood for, fair, but the slop charge is wrong.

pixel_poppingabout 9 hours ago
But why don't you show real tracking capabilities? Not what's accessible via the browser directly and legally :/
praveen4463about 9 hours ago
good stuff but useful for non tech ppl. We already knew those things are exposed by the browser. probably worth putting in x/reddit
joshstrangeabout 11 hours ago
It's somewhat interesting but over half of what it talked about is just silly.

- Reverse IP/geocode (while be cute about "we won't show your IP", oh no, not my IP!)

- Timezone - Ok, yeah, lots of websites need/make use of that for completely legit tasks

- Browser/OS/Screen size - boring, again mostly needed or historical

- GPU - Again, not super interesting IMHO

- Battery - Ok, this is the first one I think should be behind a permission dialog

- Language - Come off it, that's just table stakes

- Fonts - Again, not sure how else this should work in a "perfect" world

- Cookies/dark mode/DnT/etc - Ehh, again aside from fingerprinting (which ruins everything) these are all QoL improvements IMHO

- Referrer - Again, this is just how the web works

I think the websites that take all of that and show you a fingerprint or show the data in a more data-oriented way are way more compelling.

This, almost certainly vibe-coded, website doesn't do anything novel and hits on a huge pet peeve of mine: using low-quality arguments for a legit issue (fingerprinting). By mixing in stuff like your IP/Language on the same level as Battery/GPU/other-fingerprinty-things it makes the whole argument less compelling.

thesuitonymabout 11 hours ago
I'm with you on almost all of this, but since you (almost) asked, here's how I think fonts should work:

The server tells your browser to display a line of text in a specific font. If that font is available, your browser does so, and if not, it displays the text in your default font, or a backup font if the developer specified one. There's no need for the server to know if it's there or not.

Sophiraabout 1 hour ago
That's essentially how things used to work, and the problem is that it too can be gamed using JavaScript. For example, a relatively naive approach might be:

1. Make an HTML <span> element that contains "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" written in the default font.

2. You can't query what font that was, but you can use the getComputedStyle() DOM function of that element to work out the width (for example) of the resulting element. Note this down.

3. Do the same for all the different fonts that you want to test.

4. If any element's width differs from the default's noted in step 2, then the corresponding font is guaranteed to be installed on your system.

As written, this won't detect the font that the user has selected to be the default font (because it won't detect the width as being different). However, you can work around this (and remove most false negatives to boot) by a simple addition:

5. Pick one of the fonts that you detected as being installed.

6. Create more elements (as in step 1) that correspond to all the fonts that were detected as being the same width as the default, but have the font you selected in step 5 as a fallback. (eg. 'font-family: Testing, Fallback;')

7. Any element with a width that differs from the font you selected in step 5 is installed on the system.

What you get will be a relatively complete list of what fonts are on the system out of the ones you tested. If you want more accuracy, you can do a similar thing with individual letters instead.

mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
Fair pushback, and partially right. Most of these data points are individually defensible. Accept-Language helps with localization, Referer is just how links work, timezone is universally useful. The page's argument isn't that any single one is bad; it's that the bundle is identifying. Panopticlick / Cover Your Tracks measures combinatorial uniqueness, not any single point. The piece could be sharper about the distinction. Noted.
akerstenabout 10 hours ago
People discovering "just how the web works" have spawned myriad complaints, misguided laws, and general anger and confusion. I wish there was a test people had to take before they go online or something. Otherwise they'll still be mad that Chrome Incognito didn't prevent ads.google.com from registering them as a pageview statistic.
notatoadabout 8 hours ago
the breathless fearmongering but also condescending tone of this really makes it hard to take seriously. yeah, you can "digitally fingerprint" me when i browse the web. do you know when else you can get my fingerprints? literally any time i touch something in the real world, i leave my fingerprints behind. and nobody is making websites telling us all what a risk to privacy that is.

if you want to make me afraid of browser fingerprinting, try explaining how that information can be used to harm me. i'm aware that it's possible, i just don't care because it doesn't seem like it's that big of a deal.

basilikumabout 10 hours ago
> This volume requires JavaScript. That is part of the point — your browser is what is being read.

> With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops.

What? When I enable JS it shows me a lot of stuff that is only queriable with JS.

crazygringoabout 11 hours ago
This is just... silly. Everything it told me, while browsing on my iPhone, seems entirely reasonable.

> Every page you have ever visited knows at least this much. Most of them know more. None of them told you.

So? Why would I want the news site I'm visiting to "tell me" it knows my preferred language, that I'm using light mode, or the estimated location of my IP address...?

It's not surprising that a browser which renders text can be used to identify which fonts are available. It's not surprising that a browser which allows calculation with your GPU will identify your type of GPU.

The "without asking" framing is just silly. I expect to be asked for consent to use my webcam or microphone or exact precise location. But the last thing I want is to be asked for permission around detecting my local time zone or preferred language or my screen resolution or 20 other totally reasonable things for a website to be able to know.

mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
Right that most of these aren't surprises individually, and right that nobody wants a permission prompt for Accept-Language. The argument isn't that you should, it's that the combination is enough to identify you across sites without your awareness, and that the wider tracking ecosystem trades on that bundle. The piece is editorial about the thing existing, not a proposal to gate every header. Reasonable to push back if you find the bundle isn't the point.
crazygringoabout 9 hours ago
Fingerprinting has exited for a long time. But this site is specifically saying "None of them told you".

The site does seem to be implying that disclosure and consent are the issues:

> We did not ask for your location.

> Nothing about this was requested. The information arrived on its own.

> Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection. It will do this again on the next page you visit, and the one after that.

> No permission is required.

It's framing this as if browsers are maliciously volunteering information that ought to be protected, and that sites are maliciously hiding the information available to them.

It does seem to be clearly suggesting that even basic pieces of information ought to be available only upon request and that this must be disclosed to users.

You say this is "not a proposal to gate every header", but it's sure looking like something close to that to me.

Retr0idabout 11 hours ago
> Your screen is 1512 by 982 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display. Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection.

No it didn't. It was queried by the JS running on the page. It's a fun demo but it could really do without the slop prose.

mwheelzabout 11 hours ago
Pedantic but right. The JS queries them; the browser returns them without prompting the user. "Volunteered" is the editorial verb for that round-trip but it does paper over a layer.
Retr0idabout 10 hours ago
It's relevant because connection-level fingerprinting is directly visible to intermediaries like cloudflare.
pixel_poppingabout 9 hours ago
Yeah, no need JS to track resolution or even mouse movements with timing, pure HTML/CSS can do.
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sitzkriegabout 8 hours ago
dark gray on black text was a terrible choice, virtually unreadable contrast
efilifeabout 6 hours ago
It's Claude that chose this and it doesn't really have eyes, so that's the reason
sitzkrieg43 minutes ago
what a terrible reason lol. i should mention i use light mode and it got that wrong to boot
tristorabout 5 hours ago
None of the information identified for me was surprising using an up-to-date Firefox on Mac w/ a mostly default configuration. I had to unblock Javascript in NoScript for the page to work.

I get the point, but I think the EFF Panopticon page is a better representation of browser fingerprinting and how it works, because most of the things shared are really basic elements of data that aren't personally identifiable. You can absolutely fingerprint Firefox with a default config, so obviously this was vibe-coded and just doesn't do much. Cool, you did a GeoIP lookup, read the user-agent, the referrer header, and the accessibility data, exactly zero of that should be surprising to anyone that knows how you access a website.

barbsabout 5 hours ago
"Your screen is 320 by 568 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display."

Not quite, I'm on a 2016 iPhone SE

relevant_statsabout 7 hours ago
The stats are wrong - on Android my finger has not moved triple digit times, and I haven't tapped double digit times. In 4 seconds.

My general location is also wrong.

This site's theme is barely visible.

And the entire idea for the site is at least couple decades old.

Unoriginal slop.

arkensawabout 5 hours ago
> You have been on this page for 92 seconds. You scrolled 0% of the way down. You never left this tab.

Uhm... how did I get to the bottom if I scrolled 0%?

thatguy0900about 12 hours ago
Man what a awful looking site. I shouldn't have to crank my brightness to max to kind of read the words
fodkodraszabout 11 hours ago
I agree, this site is an eyesore.

I use windows color filters (Grayscale inverted is my preferred, in the past I used plain inverted) for poor man's dark mode (or light mode in this case) for stuff that doesn't honor my color scheme and hurts my eyes. It also has a hotkey, so it is really handy sometimes, but you need to enable it in the settings.

Assistive technologies are great, not only because they benefit those who have no choice but to rely on them, but also they can benefit the luckier people.

rappaticabout 11 hours ago
Vibecoded slop with LLM-written copy. When will it stop
none_to_remainabout 10 hours ago
According to the "Sources" popup, creator can't even excuse the slop as AI slop:

> The prose

> Hand-written · Template-based, not generative

> Every sentence on this page was written by Matt. The code selects among prose templates based on what your browser returned. No language model writes or rewrites anything at runtime. If a condition is not covered by hand-written prose, the page stays quiet about it — we'd rather say less than say something false.

efilifeabout 11 hours ago
We desperately need some tagging system/convention here. Maybe just putting [AI] into the title. This bullshit is getting really tiring.

It looks like this is an ad by the way, check op's posting history

camillomillerabout 10 hours ago
All these submissions come from bots, and users with accounts younger than a month with one single submission (in this case three times the same submission). Maybe the system should block anyone with lower than xyz points and 20 comments to post any link? I dunno, I guess it's hard but this shit is really affecting the community.
wickerdanabout 9 hours ago
Its pretty scary when you see it like this
xinanabout 8 hours ago
I wish it knows that I absolutely hate dark modes with such low contrast.
cyanydeezabout 3 hours ago
hrm. We need a modified browser that just randomly switches the finger prints for linkndin.
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nyumatabout 7 hours ago
Another vibe-sloped false-integrity derivative. Cmon, OP..
pixel_poppingabout 11 hours ago
It's really bad, it's not using proper fingerprinting techniques, no network stack fingerprinting, no browser history via DNS poisoning, no narrowing down exact country with timing and so on. I mean this is even inferior from basic tools like amiunique, what's the point?
camillomillerabout 10 hours ago
It's a piece of AI slop that this user, with an account created 21 days ago, has been spamming here for the third time.
pimlottcabout 10 hours ago
I can’t even read this on my phone, the text is too small and the contrast is terrible
devmorabout 8 hours ago
Wow! A significant amount of that information is wrong. I guess my corporate security is doing their job pretty well.
quietsegfaultabout 8 hours ago
Jokes on them, they got the wrong IP address, dummies!!! My IP address is 127.0.0.1!
josefritzishereabout 10 hours ago
This is a great exercise, it's generally accurate on location but it's hard to express how granular they can be Identifying users through browser information. fonts? display size? processor? how unique is that really in laymans terms?
pdntspaabout 10 hours ago
Your browser discloses a lot more fingerprinting data than this
camillomillerabout 10 hours ago
Another unreadable piece of slop with Claude fonts and style that this user has already spammed three times here with an account created 21 days ago.

This is out of control, and y'all just comment these threads as if they're made by humans.

bunbun69about 7 hours ago
Ok…

Are we supposed to care?

flux3125about 10 hours ago
At least it doesn't know my age

Oh wait

Ylpertnodiabout 9 hours ago
Netscape user. Always a giveaway.
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efilifeabout 11 hours ago
We've seen tens of pages like this, all done better. Now the vibe coders got into it and completely fuck up the idea.
hackersnooze1about 9 hours ago
it got both my city and browser wrong i am not too concerned lol
romanowsabout 11 hours ago
Lol, the description text is so dramatic.
htx80nerdabout 11 hours ago
>OH MY GOD WE KNOW STUFF ABOUT YOU

peoples obsession with 100% privacy while operating in a public space is immature. if you're that risk averse dont connect to the internet.