Browser fingerprinting/tracking overview

We talk about browser fingerprinting a lot without providing a lot of background information on what it actually is outside of brief overviews on our Firefox Privacy series of blog posts…

I know is imperative to not modify preferences on TB and MB, but what about these:`

network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy
privacy.antitracking.enableWebcompat
browser.download.always_ask_before_handling_new_types
media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.video-toggle.enabled
browser.startup.homepage
browser.newtabpage.enabled
signon.rememberSignons
browser.urlbar.suggest.openpage
browser.urlbar.suggest.topsites
browser.urlbar.suggest.engines

I checked with creepjs and it shows the same results for trash, lies and crowd-blending score compared to vanilla MB.

This page won’t be for manipulating knobs on Firefox. We are not reintroducing that to Privacy Guides.

It will be about explaining:

  • What fingerprinting is
  • Types of fingerprinting, naive, vs complex (crowd)
  • Various things that cannot be hidden etc

I have had some thoughts on this in Fingerprinting FAQ · Issue #1834 · privacyguides/privacyguides.org · GitHub

We want to also spend some time answers in this discussion:

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better metrics:
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

incase someone is really into fingerprinting techniques here are some research papers

I would love to see this expand to cover more information about cross-site tracking, stateful tracking, navigational tracking, and other unintended identification techniques, such as supercookies.

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