this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
62 points (95.6% liked)
Privacy
32631 readers
489 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A big part of the anonymisation of Tor is from the routing, so I'm doubtful that just using their Firefox customizations would be enough.
That’s not what I was talking about. The Tor network (onion routing) is a totally separate thing. Tor as an application has very good anti fingerprint protections. I was referring to that feature specifically not the rest of Tor.
Sure if you really wanna benefit, use Tor’s routing. But I am just admiring that the people that built Tor really knew what they were doing in all aspects of the application including the anti fingerprint protections.
Right, I understand.
There are browsers that implement a lot of Tor Browser's anti-fingerprinting features, such as LibreWolf.
The problem is that if you're connecting to a site from an unique IP address then you're still uniquely identifiable regardless of how much your browser resists fingerprinting measures. If you have a dynamic IP address, information can still be derived from this to build an approximate profile for you (location, language, possible interests, statistically likely demographic bands etc.). It's surprising how accurate these can get.
The strength of the anti-fingerprinting features in Tor browser is really an additional protection on top of the main anonymisation feature: the routing. Everyone using the Tor browser and routing appears (kind of) the same to a site.
Connecting through a VPN provider is a half-way measure, but still won't be as good as Tor. To a site or tracker you'll appear as one of a smaller set of people connecting from that VPN where your browser fingerprint is different from others in the pool of people connecting via that VPN. That may not be enough to personally identify you, but it's enough to build a fairly well-targeted profile of you.
So tl;dr: anti-fingerprinting browser features are really cool and technically clever, but they don't protect against all the ways you can be profiled. And somewhat counter-intuitively, using only browser-level de-anonymisation features could actually make you appear more unique to sites or trackers, because you'll be one of relatively few people with that combination of browser and network connection profile.