Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Mullvad Browser:
For comparison if I test in Firefox (configured as I was previously using) I get:
"Strong" protection means that your browser is configured to protect against tracking, both come back as strong here, but as far as I can tell that doesn't take into account tracking through fingerprinting. You're right, you don't want a unique fingerprint.
When you customise and add extensions to your browser, you add to its fingerprint so even privacy extensions can be counterproductive. The way Mullvad Browser works is that because it comes ready configured for privacy with various privacy extensions (including UBo) installed by default you don't have to make changes. While this doesn't give you a "common" fingerprint exactly (hence "only one in 1041.72 browsers"), it makes you look like all the other Mullvad Browsers so there's safety in numbers. There are a few more nuances to it than that but that's basically the idea, and it's a balancing act, you could be less unique than that but you would need to make other compromises.
The catch is that you shouldn't try to configure Mullvad Browser yourself since that negates the benefit; you have to be able to live with the browser as it is out of the box which may mean sacrificing some of your favourite extensions.
So, uh... I think you're confidently incorrect on pretty much all of that.
When your browser requests a web page it doesn't report what extensions you have installed. It does report plugins but those are not extensions. My report says about 66% of browsers have the same plugins as me.
Ad blockers are a special case. Your browser doesn't tell the server you have Ubo installed but the server can detect an ad blocker if you're not requesting additional advertising related resources.
Most of the other user end configurations aren't really going to effect your fingerprint either.
It turns out that what I said earlier about intentional randomisation is correct. Firefox Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) which is enabled by LibreWolf randomises canvas results, so you're going to be unique for each fingerprinting attempt. That's just as good as being common.
In my own case, my biggest weakness is the fonts I have installed as reported by my browser. I might look into that.
Oh fair enough, I'll re-examine some of that information. I don't think I'm completely wrong. Advice on not installing extensions to avoid adding to the fingerprint comes from the official Mullvad FAQ. The philosophy of making all users look the same to blend in is something inherited from Tor Browser.
Mullvad also uses resist fingerprinting, yes canvas is unique every attempt. The EFF cover your tracks test doesn't penalise you for it, if you're coming up as unique there it's not because of that (some tests out there do though and Mullvad fails them). Having a randomised canvas itself may count as one data point I guess.