Unfortunately there are many developers that apply the Banality of Evil to their doings.
its a datamining tool, and used aggressively by reddit to overban people.
Unfortunately some of the stuff that allows fingerprinting falls into a convenience vs privacy argument. It allows a website / web app to make changes to display things more appropriately, or have helpful functionality. That's why when you use a browser that is very strict about fingerprinting, some stuff will break.
An even simpler example is the screen aspect ratio. On a small screen, you want to use as much of the space as you can, but that information can be used for fingerprinting. This was annoying on browsers like mullvad, before they updated the aspect ratio to something more modern.
That doesn't excuse companies that abuse that data for malicious fingerprinting.
I'd rather have less interactive (or whathaveyou) websites than the fingerprinting. The trade wasn't worth it.
You'd rather have your browser use the bandwidth to download all 500 language versions and 200 otherwise localized versions of the website and use some random language as default, maybe chinese or spanish for being the biggest languages.
Is it possible for URL to request the one that i want? I feel like i remember different language versions of webpages from before browser fingerprinting - though I guess I don't know long ago it started.
Even so, it seems like it only needs to know my request as a one of 500 group. An individualised fingerprint of 1 in 10bn seems like overkill to me. Assuming that's what fingerprint means in this context.
Be requesting the specific language site you are giving them the information anyway.
I'm ok to give them 1 in 500 resolution (or whatever rough order of magnitude) to tell them i want to read the EN version. That's a lot less precise than 1 in 10 billion or whatever the fingerprint is.
browser fingerprinting
Thing is, while it wasn't called "browser fingerprinting" immediately, it basically started as soon as JS was around. And feature-detection / media-queries actually make for better compatibility than just User-Agent strings (and other headers).
Content negotiation never really caught on, as best as I can tell. There's a number of headers that the client can send so that the server can select a version by language, content-type, and a few other things, but in all the web deployments I've ever done content-negotiation was never a consideration.
Almost any information can be abused.
Website should just present me with a list of languages available and i click the one i want
And which language would it start in, in order to offer you this list?
Imagine if every site did this, it would be so cumbersome. Worse than the cookie banners.
And either way, when you select the language, you've given them the fingerprinting data anyway. 😂 Completely pointless.
The language that is chosen in the top level domain of the URL.
If it is a domain.es it is in Spanish.
If it is a domain.co.uk it is in English.
If it is a domain.it it is in Italian.
Or just the main language where the website is located. It isn't difficult to add a language icon somewhere at the top or bottom.
Nothing about it needs to track the user. The only info you give them is that you can speak a certain language. Not that it is your main language. Or that you can only understand one.
But you are similarly revealing your language by going to said url.
yeah but now the website knows i speak english. that does not personally identify me. there are 5 billion people speaking english
ok nvm it's 1.5 billion, still a lot.
Yes, because you're privileged and happen to speak a common language. That's doesn't help those who don't.
name a language that websites are written in that has less than a million users
You really think icelanders don't have websites? Heck, Maltese is one of the official languages of EU so all the officiam EU pages are bound to be translated to that. Sámi languages have a official minority language status in nordic countries and they have tons their own websites.
ok so it's not a perfect solution. so?
Dude, language detection is literally done with a simple HTTP header set by the browser. There is no need for all the other crap.
Most of this stuff is done locally by the browser using media queries in CSS. There is no reason for that data to make its way to the server.
If your client can access it, it can sent it to server.
Yeah exactly. A lot of features are like, let's design the website to perfectly suit your device. But then that means they know everything about your device, otherwise they can't design for it. Then, if they know everything about your device, bad actors will abuse that information. So the only solution is going back to shit websites, but nobody wants that, so we just kind of pretend that it's not a problem and compromise as best we can
Don't speak for the lot of us.
I want to go back to websites that were actually just functional websites that did the thing they were designed to do and nothing more.
I kinda dont see a problem "boring" shitty websites that do its job. For example Wikipedia hasn't changed much and it's still my most used website, it gives me a good sense of familiarity and I know exactly what to find where
Maybe I am weird but I kinda preferr boring TBH
We once ran a trial at work for a lead generation software.
It could show who visited your website, what company they worked for, how to contact them, their socials and even a video of exactly where they pointed and clicked their mouse.
No sign up required, all by fingerprinting.
Shit was creepy as fuck, glad we don't use it anymore.
It also made me realize fingerprinting is almost impossible to avoid. There's so many little things gathered to identify you, it seems unavoidable to be traced.
Yep, and add the OS itself spying with an unremovable universal ID, by a company who proactively reports on you, and wtf moments really turn surreal.
It upsets me that in working with webpages, I regularly look at “all” the network traffic going to a website - and clearly Microsoft’s GUID is hiding somewhere it won’t even show.
Jfc… I had no idea
Oh god. I had to save this image and now I will use the sticker version of it everywhere.
They didn't really develop it, it just kinda happened, because browsers send so much goddamn data to the servers
Sorry but, that's BS. Coders developed it. I should be punching multiple coders but someone somewhere made this happen. They could have said no.
No, this is BS and not how the real world works. If would be fine if you've left it as a meme. Developers (in corps) don't decide what they'll work on.
*Just following orders.*™
Class traitors
Get CanvasBlocker on Firefox
How does it work?
https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
Lots of little pieces of data about your setup. Combined together they create a combination that is extremely unique and allows companies to track you across the web.
Yes! You are unique among the 5376518 fingerprints in our entire dataset.
Nice
oh no
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