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LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer
(browsergate.eu)
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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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Fonts, codecs, hardware, OS, extensions are all parts of a computer that never ever need to be transmitted to a website for it to function. Any information about them should be sandboxed, and if the website wants to display differently based on them, it can send static data or code in and get nothing back out.
It depends on the website, but LinkedIn certainty doesn't need full fingerprint data to operate correctly. Most privacy-respecting browsers either mask or spoof the data already.
I'm pretty sure for fonts they can tell because they have different widths, which affects page layout, which can be measured.
There's a lot of stuff like that.
Best would be make it illegal and give the law teeth. Solving it technically will always be an arms race.
Yeah, they can very easily get all of that right now. But functionally there's no good reason for any browser to let them. Page layout should be a one-way operation that doesn't allow information back through.
You'd have to kill a lot of JavaScript and CSS for that to work, and then a lot of legitimate function goes away.
Done much web development work?
You don't have to kill much functionality at all. Scripts that need to access that data should simply live in a sandbox with no network access. They can still do full computational layout.
I have done exclusively web development work.
So you're going to make it illegal to call
getBoundingClientRectand then pass that information tofetchthrough any mechanism?Essentially yes. Basically, think of two JS sandboxes that can manipulate the same DOM. One can make requests, but cannot retrieve local layout data. The other can get layout data, but not make requests. Both can set layout data.
Web developers can use the former 99% of the time, and the latter for more precise work.
Surely functionality affecting display can be standardized to the point of making them useless for fingerprints? I don’t really care what font my browser uses, as long as I don’t notice it. Similarly, other details should either be randomized, mocked, jittered, or outright blocked. Fingerprinting only works because they’re operating in a rather non-adversarial space. The weakness with their current approach is the huge set of variables, which I’m sure we can leverage to reduce the algorithms determinism.
We can either all appear the same, or appear completely unique every time. Either approach should work.
I don't know a lot about how fingerprinting works, but some of what i've read is pretty insidious. Some things could probably be obfuscated, but some of what the trackers use has legitimate purposes as well. Your application may serve different content based on the screen size, or fall back to an older library if such-and-such API isn't supported.
Personally I'd rather make targeting advertising and tracking illegal, and gut the whole thing to avoid the arms race.