A comprehensive study of how fingerprintable users are (fingerprinting.study)

43 pointsby tomrittervg3 hours ago11 comments

solarmist 4 minutes ago

Oh, damn. I thought this was about the uniqueness of human fingerprints or similar.

vova_hn2 22 minutes ago

I understand that the HN crowd is composed of many different people with radically different interests and opinions, so an "average HN opinion" would be mostly meaningless, but still...

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.

octoberfranklin 2 minutes ago

Um, no.

Scrapers and bots put a ton of effort into anti-fingerprinting. Ordinary users? Zero.

Users care mainly about cross-site fingerprinting. Bot-fighting is concerned with single-site fingerprinting.

The good answer to your dilemma is x402: https://x402.org/ Nothing in life is free; you've been paying with your attention via ads, which is where the urge to fingerprint comes from (targeting). Agentic AI is rapidly killing web ads as a revenue source. It's time to stop kicking the can on micropayments.

Also, this article commits the common mistake of assuming that privacy means hiding in the largest possible cohort. That's bogus. You can also get privacy by belonging to many one-member cohorts -- i.e. fingerprint uniquely but differently to each site you visit.

NooneAtAll5 39 minutes ago

funny how enabling letterboxing causes me to be in "under 100 samples" category

btw, is pixelRatio controllable somehow? how do I set it to 1, most common value?

NooneAtAll5 35 minutes ago

wtf is "Maximum touch points" ?

> The digitiser's touch-point count, uncollapsed.

my laptop does not have touch screen, why am I not at 0?

NooneAtAll5 31 minutes ago

interesting how Windows and Mac are almost at 100% of DRM enabled, meanwhile linux is only at 33%

anyone knows why is that?

NooneAtAll5 23 minutes ago

I wish I could select what OS to sort values for

see f.e. "Highlight" (Resolved value of the Highlight system colour keyword, as RRGGBB), which has bajillion different values for android - and I can't find the most common ones for linux

ape4 an hour ago

I read they're not releasing the details - that seems good (for the public). Hopefully they're releasing it to privacy-friendly browser makers.

_factor an hour ago

I wonder if this took into account GPU render-time fingerprinting? The minute timing differences in how you render an image are still used to identify you.

magicalhippo an hour ago

Recently did a WebGPU project and noticed Firefox polls GPU status on a 100ms timer, so you can't really use it for such as far as I can tell.

That said, Claude figured out that while Canvas copying of a loaded JPEG was out due to fingerprint resistance, it could copy it via WebGPU, so yeah...

raphlinus 4 minutes ago

If you can run compute shader code, the fingerprinting and side channel possibilities become very rich. [1] is one paper among many on this topic.

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3634737.3656283