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- Hacker News
- Fascinating visualization , as someone building productivity extensions, it is always sobering to see exactly how much surface area the browser exposes.
- EFF has this tool: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/by marysol5
- The "Hardware & Environment" part which supposedly links me across different browsers doesn't work — it differs between Safari, Firefox and Chromium.
In a private Safari window, it's not even stable across reloads.
by janfoeh - If your ISP issues an IPv6 address, isn't that pretty much game over for anonymity/uniqueness?by dylan604
- A VPN or Tor swaps it out entirely, which your browser fingerprint survives. It is a strong identifier, not a permanent one.by DavidD
- Not usually, if you're comparing it to IPv4. Many ISPs give each customer a persistent IPv4 address that doesn't tend to change over time. Because most people use NAT (internal IP address != external IP address), a server you connect to can't identify the specific computer or device.
With IPv6, it's true that in many cases servers will see you as connecting from the specific IPv6 address of your computer/device. However, IPv6 addresses contain many parts, like:
where the left part is basically the equivalent of the unchanging IPv4 address you got from the ISP, and the right part identifies your specific device. But in most OSes the right part is randomly generated and changes on some cadence (e.g. daily).2001:db8:1234:5600 : abcd:1234:5678:9abcSo in many cases, the ability for a server to individually fingerprint your device solely based on the IP address is roughly equivalent between IPv4 and IPv6. (This isn't the case if the ISP does CGNAT on IPv4, where you're sharing your IPv4 address with many customers - this would be similar in magnitude to a VPN in terms of the ability for a server to fingerprint you based on IP.)
by keito - The solution for me is not to be more common. The solution is to create a very unique profile each and every time.by cgio
- There should be a browser that lies to websites instead of caving
- So it tells me I’m unique and it can track me across different browsers. It also tells me that in a different browser with a different fingerprint. Even private browsing shows more unique fingerprints that are completely different. I don’t think this site is very useful except looking at fancy data.by Semaphor
- It's horrifying to see that our browsers give up anything at all. I feel like we need a new model where we just get served the content, and we don't serve up anything to the content provider. I feel ill.by bravoetch
- How would you prevent that? If you want to use a feature, you need to know if that feature is available. So you add methods/functions to ensure that you can fail gracefully when something is not available. That availability is the fingerprint. I don't blame the browsers as much as asshats using the tool for malicious purposes. We're not going to ban hammers because someone uses them for things other than driving nails.by dylan604
- Cool tool, but the language is painfully characteristic of AI. Maybe we are collectively getting over caring about that, but if not, it's worth a pass of "make this sound a little less like AI."
E.g., the guide page ends with
> The honest bottom line. Perfect anonymity [...]
by strbean - * You're absolutely right! ;-)by moonlighter
- I was >60% sure it would be AI given the combination of calendar year and the wording "what the browser reveals" that I saw on the HN front page - and only when I clicked did I realise how wrong I was, because the actual probability is 100%.
(Not to suggest that browser fingerprinting isn't a useful issue to highlight.)
by tom_ - It's using all the Claude fonts, it's got the Claude pulsing indicators, it's got the Claude cards, and none of the writing is useful. This has gotta be up there with one of the most Claudey Claude sites I've ever seen
Edit: oh my, even the author's comments in this thread are written by Claude...
by queenkjuul - Not just the language. Its like all LLM front end design is working off one of three templates.
- Pretty sure someone else also promoted Claude to make something like this and posted it a few weeks back.by saaaaaam
- Recently discussed prompts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48727059 [flagged] What any website can see about you
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062178 A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182352 Show HN: Modern Browsers Don't Need the Cookie Anymore
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46517654 [flagged] Show HN: DevicePrint – device fingerprinting without cookies
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037031 Show HN: Explore what the browser exposes about you
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169286 Browser Fingerprint Detector
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49359153 A live browser fingerprinting and bot detection playground
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674460 Show HN: Anti-Detect.com – Browser Fingerprint Scanner
There are definitely more! Could this be HN's favourite prompt?
by Retr0id - Also see https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/by gregsadetsky
- “ Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 311,902 tested in the past 45 days.” yet every cloudflare protected website blocks me, random human checks and also my bank and government is blocked. Mmmmm grain of salt?by thenthenthen
- My understanding is that this tool only compares how identifiable you are compared to the other people who have previously visited the site.
- This is better than the OP in practically every conceivable wayby queenkjuul
- It's worth noting that you need both uniqueness and some form of stability. If you consistently show up as a diffent fingerprint every time you visit or for every different site, then that is a form of privacy as well.by RandomBK
- Shocking, this site assigned me a UUID and I found it listed here! https://everyuuid.com/by bobbiechen
- I just downloaded a fresh install of LibreWolf to test this and it did indeed have a stable UUID for me at 1/62E6. Better than the 1/680E6 from regular Firefox, but still upsetting. Fonts and Audio fingerprinting seems to be where a lot of the entropy is coming from... Even after I enabled some of the flags to resist font enumeration it still is stable and high entropy. I'm not sure what to do to be honest about this, it is very discouraging.by jszymborski
- This doesn’t seem right. 1 in 6.2 billion for Firefox on an iphone, not including ip/network uniqueness?
Seems more plausible that anti-fingerprinting is throwing it off?
by dd8601fn - Yeah seems like it doesn't account for anti-fingerprinting at all.by randomblock1
- Also 1 in 6.2 billion for Safari on an iPhone. Also the explanation on the bottom is very small and AI generated.by dullcrisp
- Also skeptical. Pixel 7 on Android 15 with patched Chrome incognito on T-Mobile CGNAT showing 1 in 11 billion.
The population on Earth is ~8.3 billion. I find it hard to believe it's that unique. Nothing in the data looked particularly interesting.
Maybe slightly plausible if you take into account the currently assigned IPv6 although that's largely time bound.
by nijave - Some of the data seems straight-up wrong.
I know this computer has more RAM than reported and it's definitely not on a 4G network either.
by mattkrause