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Browser Fingerprinting And Why VPNs Won’t Make You Anonymous (hackaday.com)

submitted 2 days ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

103 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Amidst the glossy marketing for VPN services, it can be tempting to believe that the moment you flick on the VPN connection you can browse the internet with full privacy. Unfortunately this is quite far from the truth, as interacting with internet services like websites leaves a significant fingerprint. In a study by [RTINGS.com] this browser fingerprinting was investigated in detail, showing just how easy it is to uniquely identify a visitor across the 83 laptops used in the study.

As summarized in the related video (also embedded below), the start of the study involved the Am I Unique? website which provides you with an overview of your browser fingerprint. With over 4.5 million fingerprints in their database as of writing, even using Edge on Windows 10 marks you as unique, which is telling.

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[–] mirshafie@europe.pub 2 points 18 hours ago

This somehow assumes that your fingerprint is going to vary, and be unique, every time you interact with a tracker. That's basically not ever going to be the case for casual use.

If Cloudflare fails the tick-box Captcha and I need to tell it what squares contain motorcycles, that would suggest that I currently have a unique fingerprint that they do not have yet enough history on to tie to a person. How often do you get to do the square puzzle nowadays?