this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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On each page load, Reddit pings home with some of your browser stats, including your user agent. You can't block it (easily) because it randomly uses real API endpoints for the ping, for example it will ping to /api/comment which is used to post comments so if you block that you can't post...
What I'm getting at is, they must be collecting that data for something, and doing it this way is obviously an attempt to fingerprint.
Oh and if you're using multiple accounts in the same browser without containers/incognito/profiles then they know about it, they keep data on the browser about all of them and send it to the server so it can correlate them.
Would using Tor prevent fingerprinting or at least minimise the collection of data? I log in to Reddit by Tor nowadays.
If you mean Tor the network no, it just hides your IP. If you mean Tor the browser yes, it has all kinds of privacy features.
isnt the tor browser just firefox?
It's a highly customized version of Firefox preconfigured to be more anonymous.
Like I said, I used another instance of my browser in a different sandbox. None of the data from my usual instance was there.