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Web Browser Privacy (privacytests.org)
4 points by h0ek on May 16, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


Sad to see vanilla Firefox doing so poorly. I wonder why they haven't managed to tackle the fingerprinting issues yet?


To be frank I don't think that browsers should implement those things by default. It's one thing to block a cookie or a script that is used exclusively for advertising. But those "fingerprinting" tests are simply seeing if the browser will accurately report the screen size, what fonts are available, how embedded media will be displayed, etc.

Those kinds of metrics are useful during normal web browsing. Disabling them could cause problems rendering sites, and doesn't really do much to prevent tracking. This is still a very limited dataset compared to what would have been used to generate a fingerprint 10 years ago.

I feel the same about some of the other issues on this list. Should browsers be stripping query strings out of urls? Should they refuse to report on your referring page? Is there really any benefit to proxying http traffic through a 3rd party service?

There are potential usability tradeoffs to consider that could outweight the privacy benefits.

Firefox, uBlock, and a DNS level ad blocker will do a very good job of removing the majority of unnecessary tracking.




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