A comprehensive study of how fingerprintable users are
45 points - today at 7:03 PM
SourceComments
Yup. Because I use my own browser. Built from scratch with exception of V8, Stylo html5ever, and a few other bits and bobs. A fresh new rendering engine in Rust and all. Not a fork of any existing engine. Native support for uBlock Origin filter lists and custom filters. It scores above ~20 in speedometer as of today and covers WPT about 89%. Will be publishing it soon as permissive open source.
CSS Colours SelectedItem and SelectedItemText was the only problematic one, and uniquely identified me to less than 0.0054 of Linux users.
Why?
I find it mildly amusing that HN both loudly complains about bots scraping their websites AND is very interested in user privacy.
The conflicting part is that user privacy automatically means that you cede any control over how exactly does the user accesses your resource. Whether they use a web browser or an automated scraper. Any attempt to analyze requests to tie different requests made by the same actor together automatically means privacy violation.
I don't have a good answer to this dilemma yet, I just thought that this is a curious observation and wanted to share.
btw, is pixelRatio controllable somehow? how do I set it to 1, most common value?