Tor is off the table for me because it’s so slow. If you can point to some test sites or documentation that supports your choice, please include!
Haven’t heard any opinions on arkenfox yet…anyone have any thoughts?
Mullvad browser
You need to use or spoof a browser that is used by a lot of people, and have a screen resolution (or spoof) that is common (like 1920x1080), and set the browser to only use basic fonts like times new roman, consolas. Avoid sites that use canvas, or install a canvas blocker, which basically ignores this html element when loading the page. Mitigating fingerprinting is about blending in
Can’t someone come up with a browser that just randomly lies when asked about the characteristics that could be used for fingerprinting?
Except for trusted, whitelisted sites.
That seems like it would be a pretty good privacy enhancer.
Not sure about the whitelisting part, but I think this is what Brave already does. Randomizing fingerprinted data as opposed to blending in. Makes it hard to build a profile on.
It would really stand out.
It would produce something completely different every time.
You either need to be indistinguishable from everyone else, or indistinguishable from your last page load.
Just randomly inserting fake fonts, changing your screen resolution by a few pixels, changing the variant of English between US, Canada, UK and Australia. Rendering text and images with unnoticeable random dither in the subpixel hinting. That sort of stuff.
Mullvad and Tor and it isn’t close. I use it to circumvent bans on social media when I say something too communist. Don’t alter it with addons in any way its perfect as it is.
If google, reddit, facebook, etc. can’t figure out I’m circumventing them I consider that good enough.
I also like Mullvad for most cases it has adblock by default which lowers the annoyances.
Many websites will be pissy if you’re secure as possible. Tor and Mullvad browser make them very pissy often. Its best to have a backup browser for that and normal activities. Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium are good choices there. More secure, but fingerprintable enough that sites don’t get pissy.
Facebook doesn’t care about vpns or fake users/accounts because it drives enfagement.
Use this site to test your uniqueness in different browsers and VPN setups:
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/
I have found that Mullvad Browser + VPN (with DAITA and Multihop ON) are better than FireFox or LibreWolf. Me and another user on here went through a little back and forth comparing some things. Just follow the comment thread from here:
https://programming.dev/comment/15090531
(take it with a grain of salt and DYOR, we are not experts)
Also, I love Tor, but another reason to be careful: exit nodes can be run by anyone, including bad actors and any 3-letter agency in the world. At the very least, add a VPN layer when using Tor.
ETA: Keep in mind that it’s not just the browser that matters. Your screen size, GPU, operating system, and several other factors also add or take away from your uniqueness in terms of browser fingerprint. Basically, they less you change in the browser, the more generic and similar to everyone else you look like. The better your OS hides things from apps (for instance, in flatpak sandboxes) the better.
ETA2: I like creepjs for testing over EFF’s tool for one main reason. EFF tells you how unique you are, theoretically. Creepjs actually takes extra steps to make a guess at whether or not the browser is lying and trying to hide from fingerprinting. That being said, might as well use both to corroborate.
For the record you can exclude certain countries from your tor options. I am of the opinion that most people aren’t going to need to avoid government stuff, but if you do, exclude, say, 5 eyes countries if you live in one. It’ll make it quite hard for them to get the full picture
I’ve tested this on Debian and roughly:
- Mullvad (default): A+
- Librewolf (+setup): B
- Librewolf (default): C
- Firefox (default): D
- Chromium (default): F
Try out https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
This has been my experience as well. What tweaks are you making to default librewolf?
Technically, the best way to blend in is to avoid changing the behaviour much from the default. I would still advise the below settings because they do improve your security, and anti-fingerprinting against naive first-party fingerprinting scripts (all 3rd party scripts/iframes should be blocked, see below: uBlock Medium/Hard). If you need protection against advanced fingerprinting use Tor/Mullvad browser.
uBlock:
-
Change uBlock blocking mode to Medium or Hard using the instructions on their Github wiki. Can cause site breakage on shitty websites (eg sites that import large JS libraries from remote sources). It is a substantial improvement over default, see the wiki for medium mode: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode
-
Enable filterlist
Privacy>Block Outside Intrusion to LAN(Access to LAN is used to fingerprint or by threat actors during reconnaissance phase of hacking) -
Consider enabling other filterlists included in uBlock. Try to minimize enabling extra lists from the default to avoid further fingerprinting.
Librewolf:
-
Enable limiting of referrers under
LibreWolf Preferences>Privacy>Limit cross-origin referers -
Enable letterboxing under
LibreWolf Preferences>Fingerprinting>Enable letterboxing
-
Neptr covered it better than I could’ve. I also added privacy badger though I’m not sure that does anything🤷
The more plugins you add, the more unique you become, just FYI.
Womp womp
This.
Its is pretty easy to get rid of all the rbave crap. You just need a policy file:
# cat /etc/brave/policies/managed/brave_policies.json { "BraveRewardsDisabled": true, "BraveWalletDisabled": true, "BraveVPNDisabled": 1, "BraveAIChatEnabled": true, "NewTabPageLocation": "https://search.brave.com/", "TorDisabled": false, "PasswordManagerEnabled": false, "DnsOverHttpsMode": "automatic" }Yeah but i don’t want to recommend a browser to someone just for them to have some cryptocurrency, AI chatbot, and Ad reward program shoved in their face.
And then telling them that they Can get rid of it, they just have to go make some file they don’t understand in a location on their hard drive they’ve never been to.
Because being real, if Brave’s bloat was bundled into an antivirus software, it would rightfully raise red flags for anyone with standard computer literacy.
well yeah I guess some decide to make revenue with this “shady” practices like brave does and others just take 400 millions from google.
I mean, I fault Mozilla for that, and a lot of other things especially in light of recent developments. But Brave still fosters user dependency on a google project, ceding browser engine market dominance toward google. I might be bale to give Brave a pass for its faults if it was making strong moves in creating a truly free and open internet, but as-is they’ve basically taken an open-source project, applied their own branding, and baked in functionality that on a better engine can be replicated with more granular control by extensions.
Have you tried daily driving tor recently? You can certainly get slow speeds still, but in my experience recently they’re generally not too bad most of the time, especially for things coming out of the major CDNs.
Ironfox on Android is great.
Default settings or what are we supposed to compare here?
Yeah if default settings, mullvad is probably hard to beat if tor is off the table.
🤔Well, hmmm. How bout out of the box/to start with?
I don’t think many people here use Brave Browser because of their crypto referral program, but they’ve made strides at mitigating fingerprinting. I use Brave Browser on my PC and Android and never had an issue.
Brave is a series scam company.
For me, no matter how good their browser is, I ain’t going to use it. If someone forks it to remove the BAT crypto nonesense id consider using it. I’ve been tempted to compile chromium from source and just add brave-core content/fingerprint blocking. Ideally, any fork would maintain the same general fingerprint with brave.
For now, Cromite is the way to go in-terms of hardened Chromium with built-in adblocking and without Google nonesense. The only downside is their choice to use Adblock Plus engine, but this is for the technical reason that engine is inferior to uBlock Origin and Brave Shields. The inclusion of ABP doesn’t effect privacy (ik people will understandably mention the ABP scandal) because they forked ABP and use custom filter lists, which is still a very good benefit above vanilla Chromium.
Idk what the fuss is about. Brave is a decent option with all the crypto stuff turned off.
Having to spend souch time tweaking it on a fresy install. Annoying af. I still use it cuz nothing else meets all my needs.
It takes like 1 minute. How often do you reset your system?
Distro hopping from time to time. So enough to be familiar with the process…
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