this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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Any extensions or mitigations you use can be detected and used to increase the fingerprint of your browser/device even more.
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/
If I visit that page I get a "fingerprinting activity detected" warning from JShelter and then a mostly blank page with "FP ID: Computing..." at the top, and a bunch of javascript errors in the console.
Most sites are fine with the settings where I normally leave them, but it's not much of a surprise for one that's devoted entirely to browser fingerprinting to be broken by JShelter. Stopping or at least making more difficult most fingerprinting attempts is among the things it does. It can't stop all of them of course, but it's one component that helps to work against them.
WebWorker is disabled by default in JShelter which is required for creepjs to work. If you set just that function to Strict instead of just the default Remove, then creepjs still works fine.
But creepjs could be modified to work without webworker if you were thinking JShelter really does something useful to hide your fingerprint from someone who wants it bad enough. And you can still be fingerprinted many other ways even without JavaScript at all.
Yeah my main browser is easily fingerprinted due to the many ways it is non-standard. I'll use torbrowser or something if it actually matters. But JShelter does not really make that problem worse for most people, and it probably frustrates some fraction of attempts — including those that rely on web workers apparently.
The page load time of creepjs would not be acceptable for use in real life. Anything with that much creepy js is going to get itself blocked by other means.
Well any site that uses fingerprinting tech, regardless of what it is, is just going to have it load silently in the background so I don't think it would be noticeable anyways.
That depends on what's making it take so long, among other things. But with sufficient effort I suppose the more sneaky fingerprinters (those which aren't aren't already blocked by other extensions) could probably be made difficult to notice for unprepared users. JShelter popping up a big warning about a "very high" level of fingerprinting activity is a pretty good hint though, and I take it as a suggestion to add some rules for ublock if I expect to visit that site again.
As it continues to get more common, maybe it's time to go back to using noscript as well.
Mullvad browser uBlock jshelter privacybadger NoScript