this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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Browser Fingerprinting And Why VPNs Won’t Make You Anonymous (hackaday.com)
submitted 20 hours ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
63 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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[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

You can't hide or get rid of the browser fingerprint, but some addons can help to randomize it so it looks like you're using a different device every time you visit a site.

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 12 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Personally, I don’t care if a site can fingerprint me. As long as they can’t tie that fingerprint to a rich data set.

So I make sure that each domain gets a different fingerprint response. That means that a site can validate that I’m still the same user, but any XSS attempting fingerprint based data exchange just gets garbage.

[–] tb_@lemmy.world 6 points 16 hours ago

And how do you go about that? Do you adjust your window size and extensions on a site-by-site basis?

[–] realitista@lemmus.org 2 points 14 hours ago

Is Firefox's claimed Anti fingerprinting technology any good?