Fingerprinting isn’t always possible to defeat, and its not always possible to avoid making accounts (work and school accounts)

However, it should be possible to fill up tracked data with meaningless garbage and reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. Ex: a bot that browses random products on amazon to reduce profiling accuracy.

Do you guys know of any tools that do this? Anything from browser extensions to command line scripts, to anonymous group-accounts.

  • @refalo
    4•1 day ago

    I would be very careful about saying Tor/Mullvad/Brave are anywhere near approaching k-anonymity… Tor Browser cannot even hide your real OS when queried from javascript, and there are current ways to detect all of those browsers independently.

    I think one problem is that most people’s (general non-tech population) browser setups are completely bone-stock, and so by definition “random like everyone else” is likely already excluding all the stock users and placing you in a much smaller box to compare against.

    • The 8232 Project
      3•1 day ago

      I would be very careful about saying Tor/Mullvad/Brave are anywhere near approaching k-anonymity

      I agree, but it’s the best we have so far. If you take some time to sit down and think about it, a lot of the problems with internet privacy can’t be fixed without a complete overhaul of our existing systems.

      Tor Browser cannot even hide your real OS when queried from javascript

      This is true, but the exception is Tails which lies about being Windows.

      • Lemongrab
        3•1 day ago

        Lying about your host OS does nothing to protect against OS fingerprinting. Your OS can still he determined through the differences in how each OS renders and handles the Browser, and underlying architectural differences between browsers on each OS.

      • @[email protected]
        3•1 day ago

        I wish I knew how tails does it so that I could make my Linux do it as well.

        Edit: oh, it’s just spoofing the user agent af far as I can see. That doesn’t hide it being linux at all.

      • @refalo
        1•1 day ago

        Are you saying Tails has a custom fork of TBB that spoofs the OS? Do you have a link to that patch?

        • The 8232 Project
          -1•1 day ago

          Tails is an operating system. Try booting into Tails yourself and use various websites to see what I’m talking about: All of them report your operating system to be Windows, despite Tails being based on Debian.

          • @refalo
            1•1 day ago

            Tails is an operating system

            Yes, and it comes with Tor Browser, which normally does not spoof your OS when probed via javascript (only the user-agent), that is why I asked if you had a patch to the source code, which is what they would have to be using in order to do what you’re saying.

            All of them report your operating system to be Windows

            As it stands, I am not able to verify your claims, as Tor Browser on Tails 6.7 is still showing the true OS via javascript queries for me:

            https://0x0.st/XYZF.png