This is an EFF project that allows you to understand how easy it is to identify and track your browser based on how it appears to websites. Anonymous data will be collected through this site.
The EFF site is great, it tells you how many bits of information are identifiable.
If you think you have good protection, go to http://fingerprint.com and see if they can track you across multiple visits. This is a commercial fingerprinting company, on their homepage they have a tracking widget to demonstrate how good they are. So it’s always useful to use fingerprint.com to get an empirical test of if you’re trackable.
Visited on my mobile this morning while commuting and no VPN and it geo located me 1000 miles away.
Visited again connected to a WiFi network and it got me right. Fun stuff
Yep, it’s got both visits recorded. Idk why my ip on mobile networks was geolocated so far away.
Good find, 5 checks, 5 first visits! That’s with Brave. With Vanadium and Fennec it figures me out though.
7 visits with brave, 7 times identified as the same. I’m using the default options of a fresh brave install
how did you have such success?
Not sure honestly, I’m always behind a VPN, which I was changing servers, as if it were actually able to fingerprint me that wouldn’t have mattered so I didn’t want a false positive from making it too easy, I do run GrapheneOS so not sure if the OS is either not sending or randomizing OS info on top of that, that it would normally get. Been a while but the only thing I changed from default in Brave was changing fingerprinting to strict. For the sites I visit its still fine 95% of the time so I leave it that way. I’ve read from others and their browsing habits it breaks a ton of sites. So e YMMV there.
My impression is the thing with modern day ad tracking, selling information to spammers, and hackers is, even if you secure your browser tighter than a drum, any one of your browser extensions, which we’ve given permission to read all site data on every site you visit and interact with, could be keeping extensive logs on your activity and selling that away to the highest bidder. Am I understanding that right?
I have been doing fingerprint research for several years. I’ve done countless builds with various browsers, configurations, extensions, and strategies. (Yes i have too much time for this).
Here is what I’ve concluded. I hope this helps someone.
CoverYourTrack is crap, plain and simple. Your best option will always be to randomize. Always. You will not “blend in”. I don’t care if you run Google Chrome on Windows 10 or Safari on iOS, JavaScript exposes way too much info, you will always have a unique fingeprint. Just go play around with fingerprint.com on some normie browser/os setups and you will see what i mean.
You must randomize all the values that you see on sites like browserleaks.com. canvas, audio context, webgl hash, clientrects, fonts, etc etc. I’d also make sure you are proxifying all your browsers and using random locations. You can do this with Brave somewhat, which has some randomization stuff in it. You can do this with browser extensions as well. Ungoogled chromium also has some randomization for canvas and clientrects i think
There are only a couple options outside of this that I recommend, in the realm of “generic fingerprint” solutions. TOR browser (they have been on the front lines of this for many years). And also Mullvad browser, which, despite its generic fingerprint goal, seems to also defeat fingerprint.com.
Tldr, if you want the best experience out of the box that is also very usable, just use Mullvad Browser. They are basically the browser i wished for for like a decade.
When I tried tor it was so painfully slow that I have a difficult time imagining anything using it full time
Here’s my result (Tested on Safari on iPad)
You should post the # of bits of identifying info it was able to derive. Best I’m able to do is 15 bits or so. Never seen it below 14, meaning you’re able to be nearly uniquely fingerprinted everywhere.
Your Results Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors tested in the past 45 days, only one in 94902.5 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours. Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 16.53 bits of identifying information.
It seems that my Safari does not have very strong tracking protection.
Tor browser gives 6.8 bits, with javascript disabled https://files.catbox.moe/d74wf1.png
While everyone’s at it, you may want to check for leaks with Mullvad VPN’s service, it picked up a DNS leak for me that got past a few other sites:
edit: also ipleak.net, which tests a few other things, like torrent ips
Huh, it says I’m leaking DNS servers and WebRTC IPs, but I don’t have secure DNS enabled, and I’m not really sure why WebRTC leaking my IP is a problem considering I’m already “leaking” my IP just by visiting a website.
In my case I had reset a device and didn’t disable IPv6. Once I fixed that the bottom two tests still say I’m “leaking”, but all three show only one IP each, for my VPN’s servers (maybe different IPs, but one for each.)
If I were actually leaking, IPs shown would be for a local DNS, or my residence, etc.
Well that’s interesting. I’ve read more than one place the having uBlock Origin is “enough” and that adding Privacy Badger is overkill. I’ve also got AdGuard Home running on a Pi-4. I failed all three tests with Vivaldi Nightly and Arc Browser–both with uBO installed…
Simply adding Privacy Badger to the existing setup, suddenly I had “strong web protection”.
[edit] Firefox passed without having to add Privacy Badger.
thanks for the tip, i’m already on firefox, but when run it said i had “some protection” for both blocking tracking ads, and blocking invisible trackers, added privacy badgers after reading your post, because why not, and now it says YES for both
17.54 bits of identifying information tho :0
