8 ms·

A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

625 points by mwheelz 4mo ago

praveen4463 4mo ago
good stuff but useful for non tech ppl. We already knew those things are exposed by the browser. probably worth putting in x/reddit
____tom____ 4mo ago
I doubt the fonts on my iPhone identify me. As far as I know, they would be the fonts it came with. Or can apps install fonts?
rassimmoc 4mo ago
[dead]
nick49488171 4mo ago
The gyroscope and battery should not be getting exposed without permission. That seems unexpectedly invasive, and I'm in tech. Also we should disable referrer field.
reenorap 4mo ago
How do we get our browser to stop sending all this information? It's really maddening.
- chainingsolid 4mo ago
  2/3 of the big browsers are open source, you could just change it this year! (Assuming your mobile device isn't from the former personal computer company turned status symbol manufacturer). Harder problem is getting the economic system that relies on this information swapped out. Have fun when 99% of web doesn't 'work'.
- al_borland 4mo ago
  I tried it with a VPN running and in the Mullvad browser and it got all the big stuff wrong. Where are you was sent to another location due to the VPN, this was all it really impacted. When you arrived was wrong because of the Mullvad browser, even without the VPN enabled it reports that I'm in Reykjavik, which I'm not. What you brought with you, it got the resolution wrong, as the browser locks itself to various resolutions to prevent this kind of fingerprinting. GPU and Battery both say "kept back", I assume this means it couldn't get anything, because when I run in Safari it says Apple GPU.
superkuh 4mo ago
With javascript off it just stalls at "reading" forever. There are certainly some viewport properties and other things it does know even without JS execution, but the mitigation is significant. And the page itself (the JS application) cannot act on that data or communicate it. Instead it has to be processed by some other application on the backend or wherever. Not in my browser by my computer.
- Steve16384 4mo ago
  I can't help feeling that if you're turning JS off, you might as well turn off your computer to protect your data.
  - andai 4mo ago
    Nah, HTTP logs still leak my circadian rhythm.
  - MarkusQ 4mo ago
    That's actually a fantastic idea! Oh wait, no, I'm an e-addict. Drat! Curse this monkey!
  - dylan604 4mo ago
    As an experiment, I made a small retail shop (< 30 products) that would use JS for modern style async/await calls, but would then use old school POSTs if JS was disabled with full page reloads on every POST. it sucked to dev and as UX, but it was possible to do. Had the non-JS POST style updates been any less annoying, it might have been viable. Nobody likes full reloads. They suck. JS can do nice things for UX. It's just that we can't have nice things because people suck
    - efreak 4mo ago
      That's what frames are for. Only reload the frame with the important data in it (total cost, list of products in cart) and point the category links in the page to open in the same frame as the shopping cart. You can even style the frame contents with the main page's stylesheet so it only needs to load a `$41.29` total if that's all that's changed.
mrpopo 4mo ago
Happy to say that my browser didn't tell anything that I didn't expect it to. It even identified my IP from a location 1000km away from me. Firefox on Android with ublock
wincy 4mo ago
My battery is at NaN%, the site is cool but it should probably change the text if I’m not actually exposing that information. It got the city wrong but close to where I live. This stuff would be wildly wrong if I fired up my VPN. Although its annoying when I connected to a VPN to Steam it’ll often show my prices in Canadian dollars instead of USD.
- freedomben 4mo ago
  Heh, my battery (which I don't have cause this is a desktop) is at 100% apparently
  - dylan604 4mo ago
    Battery: kept back Your browser kept your battery level back. Firefox removed this API entirely in 2016, after researchers proved it could be used to track a visitor across websites without cookies, without consent. The API still exists in the specification. It was simply hidden — from you, and from any page that might ask after it. Well, at least something positive from the shit I take for not sheepling my way through life using Chrome
    - llbbdd 4mo ago
      I got this message and I'm on Chrome, on a laptop. I tested in the console on that site and was able to get the battery level though, so I'm pretty sure their check is just broken.
      - mwheelz 4mo ago
        [dead]
      - efreak 4mo ago
        Might be bugged or you might have some setting that doesn't allow websites to use it. Try https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/battery-status/ https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/battery-status/
Multicomp 4mo ago
Mine told me my graphics card was "or similar" so my stock Firefox is doing at least okay. While I still follow the general privacy first tenets, I have ended up backing off on some tools (noscript and librewolf) at the extremes of privacy because if every site is going to track everything by my IP or by my ASN or browser fingerprint, I do have a happy medium of being private enough while not being utterly broken in my browsing. Roughly that looks like email aliases on demand via sieve rules, ublock origin with liberal use of filter lists, different handles and a password manager, frozen credit ratings, and Tailscale exit nodes or Mozilla(Mullvad) VPN for uncontrolled WiFi access points for my jnrootabke android device and mostly signal for comms. I'm getting to old to be a privacy extreme enthusiast when all of my family side channels everything straight to Facebook, so this is the impure level of privacy I can sustain.
- Milpotel 4mo ago
  Same for me, also the "screen" size is off (just shows window size), the location is off by hundreds of kilometres and other information is quite generic (battery level "kept back", small set of standard fonts available...).
freedomben 4mo ago
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it gives my exact GPU, but that was surprising to me. Just so everyone knows, its an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT and I paid way too much for it during the covid/crypto price explosion when they were sold out everywhere. Still a bit raw about that, but it is an excellent card on Linux (fedora)
- scragz 4mo ago
  you are using a Radeon RX 6900 XT on Fedora Linux. we know this because you admitted it in the previous comment.
- ape4 4mo ago
  Yeah the exact kind shouldn't matter - just the WebGL capabilities.
- dylan604 4mo ago
  "Your graphics processor identified itself as or similar" guess mine isn't such a specific model as yours. so I don't have a real GPU, i have something similar to a GPU??? did I get a knock off Alibaba version?
  - stusmall 4mo ago
    I got "or similar" from Firefox and exact make and model from chrome. Probably a browser issue and not a hardware issue.
    - dylan604 4mo ago
      not regretting choice of browser at all
    - mwheelz 4mo ago
      Confirmed. Firefox's privacy hardening returns "Mozilla, or similar" or just "Mozilla" as the renderer string. Chrome doesn't (yet). My parser was treating the Firefox string as if it were ANGLE format and grabbing the wrong half. Fixed.
aidanbeck 4mo ago
Aside from the fingerprinting methods, the graphics processor string seems to be the most immediately personal data given up (other than location, which was incorrect for me). I could see sites tailoring ads around an assumed class, income, and level of digital literacy based on this data point alone.
chrisweekly 4mo ago
I appreciate the intent here, so this is constructive feedback: - Some of the numbers are off, eg "Your browser allocated 39322 MB of storage to this page alone" - low contrast in dark mode makes text hard to read
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  The 39 GB number is a bug. I was reading quota (browser allow-up-to ceiling) and calling it "allocated." Fixed; pushing now. Contrast is intentional but I hear you. not changing it but noted, and a cleaner reading mode is on the to-do later.
  - topham 4mo ago
    Contrast is a violation of accessibility guidelines.
    - warkdarrior 4mo ago
      This site is already violating your privacy. Do you think they care about your accessibility needs?
      - topham 4mo ago
        The site isn't violating your privacy.
yakkomajuri 4mo ago
DuckDuckGo browser helped mask some stuff, but definitely a fair amount still goes through. Annoyingly the web is becoming a bit more annoying to browse as a DuckDuckGo (mobile) and Brave (desktop) user. With a VPN on top it gets even worse.
ebolyen 4mo ago
There's really a lot more you can look at here. Lot's a prior art on super-cookies and fingerprinting: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://amiunique.org/ https://amiunique.org/
- cf100clunk 4mo ago
  Another info leakage feedback tool: https://www.ipleak.com/full-report/ https://www.ipleak.com/full-report/
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  Both linked in the Sources & Confessions modal at the bottom. Cover Your Tracks is the spiritual ancestor of this whole piece. amiunique is more rigorous; this is the editorial cousin.
  - cf100clunk 4mo ago
    Brutally dark site doesn't seem to show much to my eyes. No modal appearing at the bottom.
- nottorp 4mo ago
  Hmm interesting. I tried the EFF site and among other things it told me I'm on "MacIntel". Gave me a scare, thought I'm still somehow running an x86 build of Firefox.
Gualdrapo 4mo ago
Text is so dim is really hard to read.
- O1111OOO 4mo ago
  If you're on FF, this could be helpful for these kinds of sites (I use it all the time): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/site-color-changer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/site-color-ch...
card_zero 4mo ago
* I'm not in that city. * It's running a kind of Chrome on a kind of Linux, at a stretch. * Nobody can infer when I work and when I sleep. That includes me. * The recent, high-end display is the screen of a low-end tablet I bought in a supermarket five years ago. * But yes, browser fingerprinting is annoying. * Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?
- cush 4mo ago
  The amount of fingerprinting this page reveals pales in comparison to what actually happens in the wild
  - jwally 4mo ago
    its ease is also vastly inflated. If it was as simple as this site makes it out to be, companies like fingerprint.com don't exist.
    - shimman 4mo ago
      Don't know about easy but their JS lib doing this is quite good: https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs Honestly surprised to see it licensed as MIT now too. It was something less permissive before. They aren't doing anything too crazy, more like being the first ones to be open about it. I couldn't imagine what else companies like Google or Meta or TikTok can extract out of it that no one else can't. Integrations aren't exactly hard to make, quality is hard yes, but making half assed plumbing is sufficient too. Those advertisers benefit from monopolistic markets with zero regulation while owning the platforms they sell advertising on that requires their explicit malware in order to use, what is unique about their finger printing versus what fingerprintjs provides?
      - bdelmas 4mo ago
        I knew about this library but is it legal in the EU? Because that library works very well
ramon156 4mo ago
Its mixing confidential info. For example, you know I'm connected from a location, but you do not know my precise location. I connected from a tower that is from Odido, but I am not paying Odido for a subscription.
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  Right, IP-to-geo is approximate and gets a lot of cases wrong (yours among them). Most ad networks use it as a region/DMA hint, and not precise positioning. The point of including it isn't precision. It's that any location is more than nothing, and the visitor never opted in.
thatguy0900 4mo ago
Man what a awful looking site. I shouldn't have to crank my brightness to max to kind of read the words
- fodkodrasz 4mo ago
  I agree, this site is an eyesore. I use windows color filters (Grayscale inverted is my preferred, in the past I used plain inverted) for poor man's dark mode (or light mode in this case) for stuff that doesn't honor my color scheme and hurts my eyes. It also has a hotkey, so it is really handy sometimes, but you need to enable it in the settings. Assistive technologies are great, not only because they benefit those who have no choice but to rely on them, but also they can benefit the luckier people.
aziaziazi 4mo ago
> Your screen is 320 by 568 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display. It’s been a long time my 2016’ iPhone as been called recent or high-end but I’ll take the compliment, thank-you.
- chainingsolid 4mo ago
  Ya, I'm not running my Pinephone's display at x2 cause its a high end display on a $200 phone.....
crazygringo 4mo ago
This is just... silly. Everything it told me, while browsing on my iPhone, seems entirely reasonable. > Every page you have ever visited knows at least this much. Most of them know more. None of them told you. So? Why would I want the news site I'm visiting to "tell me" it knows my preferred language, that I'm using light mode, or the estimated location of my IP address...? It's not surprising that a browser which renders text can be used to identify which fonts are available. It's not surprising that a browser which allows calculation with your GPU will identify your type of GPU. The "without asking" framing is just silly. I expect to be asked for consent to use my webcam or microphone or exact precise location. But the last thing I want is to be asked for permission around detecting my local time zone or preferred language or my screen resolution or 20 other totally reasonable things for a website to be able to know.
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  Right that most of these aren't surprises individually, and right that nobody wants a permission prompt for Accept-Language. The argument isn't that you should, it's that the combination is enough to identify you across sites without your awareness, and that the wider tracking ecosystem trades on that bundle. The piece is editorial about the thing existing, not a proposal to gate every header. Reasonable to push back if you find the bundle isn't the point.
  - crazygringo 4mo ago
    Fingerprinting has exited for a long time. But this site is specifically saying "None of them told you". The site does seem to be implying that disclosure and consent are the issues: > We did not ask for your location. > Nothing about this was requested. The information arrived on its own. > Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection. It will do this again on the next page you visit, and the one after that. > No permission is required. It's framing this as if browsers are maliciously volunteering information that ought to be protected, and that sites are maliciously hiding the information available to them. It does seem to be clearly suggesting that even basic pieces of information ought to be available only upon request and that this must be disclosed to users. You say this is "not a proposal to gate every header", but it's sure looking like something close to that to me.
Retr0id 4mo ago
> Your screen is 1512 by 982 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display. Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection. No it didn't. It was queried by the JS running on the page. It's a fun demo but it could really do without the slop prose.
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  Pedantic but right. The JS queries them; the browser returns them without prompting the user. "Volunteered" is the editorial verb for that round-trip but it does paper over a layer.
  - Retr0id 4mo ago
    It's relevant because connection-level fingerprinting is directly visible to intermediaries like cloudflare.
- pixel_popping 4mo ago
  Yeah, no need JS to track resolution or even mouse movements with timing, pure HTML/CSS can do.
troyvit 4mo ago
> Your graphics processor identified itself as or similar. That checks out. I think what I have is similar to a graphics card but isn't quite.
- wlesieutre 4mo ago
  My GPU identification is off by about a decade but it did get the brand right
  - Sohcahtoa82 4mo ago
    Seriously. My laptop was manufactured last year, and the site identified it as a Radeon R9 200 series. That was a top-of-the-line GPU...back in 2014.
    - wlesieutre 4mo ago
      Same ID for mine. Are you running Firefox? Maybe that's a lie it tells to fingerprinters.
      - mrguyorama 4mo ago
        I am running Firefox. Firefox does not report you GPU according to the site, instead returning a generic "Mozilla" GPU. More of you should be running current Firefox. It actually has serious engineering work going into protecting you from web tracking. I work for a team entirely dependent on web tracking for Fraud prevention. The things Firefox does work to protect you and make our job harder. They genuinely make it harder for websites to track you. Other things that genuinely help: Apple private relay. Some VPNs. Generated unique credit cards.
pona-a 4mo ago
A vibe-coded EFF Cover Your Tracks. The fact this made it to front-page is spookier than its contents
- camillomiller 4mo ago
  Yes! By a user who’s 21 days old, has never commented and it’s not even following this thread as he has absolutely never replied and never will. Having these kind of submissions not flagged is killing hacker news
  - EricBetts 4mo ago
    I think at least they're following the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064959
  - serial_dev 4mo ago
    I disagree, the discussion is still interesting to me. The page might be low quality AI slop (though it claims it’s not), I did find the discussion about it informative to a degree.
- moritzwarhier 4mo ago
  exactly, it even looks like a page created by someone asked to "replicate this, non-obviously, add fancy landing page theme". Fugly.
joshstrange 4mo ago
It's somewhat interesting but over half of what it talked about is just silly. - Reverse IP/geocode (while be cute about "we won't show your IP", oh no, not my IP!) - Timezone - Ok, yeah, lots of websites need/make use of that for completely legit tasks - Browser/OS/Screen size - boring, again mostly needed or historical - GPU - Again, not super interesting IMHO - Battery - Ok, this is the first one I think should be behind a permission dialog - Language - Come off it, that's just table stakes - Fonts - Again, not sure how else this should work in a "perfect" world - Cookies/dark mode/DnT/etc - Ehh, again aside from fingerprinting (which ruins everything) these are all QoL improvements IMHO - Referrer - Again, this is just how the web works I think the websites that take all of that and show you a fingerprint or show the data in a more data-oriented way are way more compelling. This, almost certainly vibe-coded, website doesn't do anything novel and hits on a huge pet peeve of mine: using low-quality arguments for a legit issue (fingerprinting). By mixing in stuff like your IP/Language on the same level as Battery/GPU/other-fingerprinty-things it makes the whole argument less compelling.
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  Fair pushback, and partially right. Most of these data points are individually defensible. Accept-Language helps with localization, Referer is just how links work, timezone is universally useful. The page's argument isn't that any single one is bad; it's that the bundle is identifying. Panopticlick / Cover Your Tracks measures combinatorial uniqueness, not any single point. The piece could be sharper about the distinction. Noted.
- thesuitonym 4mo ago
  I'm with you on almost all of this, but since you (almost) asked, here's how I think fonts should work: The server tells your browser to display a line of text in a specific font. If that font is available, your browser does so, and if not, it displays the text in your default font, or a backup font if the developer specified one. There's no need for the server to know if it's there or not.
  - Sophira 4mo ago
    That's essentially how things used to work, and the problem is that it too can be gamed using JavaScript. For example, a relatively naive approach might be: 1. Make an HTML <span> element that contains "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" written in the default font. 2. You can't query what font that was, but you can use the getComputedStyle() DOM function of that element to work out the width (for example) of the resulting element. Note this down. 3. Do the same for all the different fonts that you want to test. 4. If any element's width differs from the default's noted in step 2, then the corresponding font is guaranteed to be installed on your system. As written, this won't detect the font that the user has selected to be the default font (because it won't detect the width as being different). However, you can work around this (and remove most false negatives to boot) by a simple addition: 5. Pick one of the fonts that you detected as being installed. 6. Create more elements (as in step 1) that correspond to all the fonts that were detected as being the same width as the default, but have the font you selected in step 5 as a fallback. (eg. 'font-family: Testing, Fallback;') 7. Any element with a width that differs from the font you selected in step 5 is installed on the system. What you get will be a relatively complete list of what fonts are on the system out of the ones you tested. If you want more accuracy, you can do a similar thing with individual letters instead.
nathanmills 4mo ago
You can't gaurentee any of this is fingerprintable without checking twice (i.e. give the user a unique url, then ask them to restart the browser and visit it). In privacy browsers like LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser this is almost all spoofed, save for things like the IP which needs to be hidden/changed independently of the browser.
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  Correct on rigor. Proving a fingerprint requires the two-visit protocol you describe. The page doesn't actually compute a stable fingerprint or attempt to track returning visitors, it shows you the signals that go into one. The barcode at the bottom is deterministic from the data shown but isn't compared against anything stored. Sloppier than a real fingerprinting tool, by design.
romanows 4mo ago
Lol, the description text is so dramatic.
carimura 4mo ago
Aren't LLMs smart enough to choose better color contrast by now?
- nosioptar 4mo ago
  Not when they've been trained on low contrast garbage.
IdiotSavage 4mo ago
> Where you were before > news.ycombinator.com This has always bothered me the most. I disabled the 'Referer' header once, but it breaks many websites.
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  The Referer header is the one that's hardest to opt out of cleanly, strip it at the network level and too many things break. Referrer-Policy lets the origin set the rule, but the visitor doesn't get to choose. There's a quiet move toward Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin as a sane default in modern browsers but it's still origin-dictated, not visitor-dictated.
  - pessimizer 4mo ago
    I strip/forge it with a old, probably outdated firefox extension (Referer Control.) But you still got news.ycombinator.com. How? I thought the extension was broken, but it's not. That was actually my only surprise, everything else I was expecting. edit: ignore this, looks like I just needed to save my preferences again. Thanks for showing me that I have been leaking my referer for some mysterious amount of time.
- exe34 4mo ago
  Hah I remember the picture of the scrotum.
- al_borland 4mo ago
  It's interesting that this breaks things. When trying to link to an internal password vault at work it would always break. People would have to click the link on my site, then reload it to get the page to load. This wan an issue for years, across multiple versions and despite many people offering up ideas to help solve it. One day I thought maybe it was a referrer issue, so I had it open with noopener,noreferrer, and that fix it. It seems odd that any site would require a user come from somewhere.
- IdiotSavage 4mo ago
  I just found a new(?) setting in Firefox, to spoof the Referer header, instead of omitting it. Will try that for a while and see how it works. about:config -> network.http.referer.spoofSource
lucideer 4mo ago
The website is pretty & the overdramatic copy is fun, but there's much better fingerprinting demos out there. The number of data points shown here is low - there's plenty more it could be checking - & a good number of them seem to be wrong (it's only detecting one as explicitly "withheld" but I believe a few of them actually are, leading to garbled output). Needs some QA.
- InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
  The overdramatic tone is pretty funny. "You are in [wrong city]. We could send a team on ninjas to kill you right now, but we chose not to. You are welcome."
- acid__ 4mo ago
  In short, another AI-generated slop project. I've seen this exact UI style a dozen times now and it's always accompanied with tell-tale overly verbose, overly dramatic text.
rappatic 4mo ago
Vibecoded slop with LLM-written copy. When will it stop
- efilife 4mo ago
  We desperately need some tagging system/convention here. Maybe just putting [AI] into the title. This bullshit is getting really tiring. It looks like this is an ad by the way, check op's posting history
  - camillomiller 4mo ago
    All these submissions come from bots, and users with accounts younger than a month with one single submission (in this case three times the same submission). Maybe the system should block anyone with lower than xyz points and 20 comments to post any link? I dunno, I guess it's hard but this shit is really affecting the community.
- none_to_remain 4mo ago
  According to the "Sources" popup, creator can't even excuse the slop as AI slop: > The prose > Hand-written · Template-based, not generative > Every sentence on this page was written by Matt. The code selects among prose templates based on what your browser returned. No language model writes or rewrites anything at runtime. If a condition is not covered by hand-written prose, the page stays quiet about it — we'd rather say less than say something false.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
sgarrity 4mo ago
I'm not worried about my privacy. No one can read the dark text on that page anyhow.
efilife 4mo ago
We've seen tens of pages like this, all done better. Now the vibe coders got into it and completely fuck up the idea.
htx80nerd 4mo ago
[flagged]
mwheelz 4mo ago
Update: I pushed two rounds of fixes for things people caught. 1. GPU "or similar" stranded prose. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" as the masked renderer string and my parser was grabbing the second half. Masked-GPU case now gets its own observation. 2. Desktop battery showing NaN/100%. Chromium reports a phantom 100%-charging battery on machines without one; my filter was too narrow. Stricter check, falls through to "kept back." 3. Storage quota of 39+ GB reading as implausible. Now expressed in GB, and the prose was reworded ("would let this page write up to" rather than "allocated to"). 4. Screen size matching window size (Firefox letterboxing / Brave farbling). Page now names it: "your browser appears to be returning the viewport in place of the real screen — anti-fingerprinting at work." 5. "Recent, high-end display" being claimed on old retina devices (iPhone 5-class). Tightened the heuristic. 6. No-JS hangs at "reading." <noscript> block added. Worth saying directly since it came up. The prose is hand-written. Each observation has a small set of templated registers and the code selects among them based on what the data returns. There is no LLM in the runtime path. AI helped me iterate on the spec like it does for most projects now. The sentences on the page are mine. If that's not the kind of work you're in the mood for, fair, but the slop charge is wrong.
- pixel_popping 4mo ago
  But why don't you show real tracking capabilities? Not what's accessible via the browser directly and legally :/
culi 4mo ago
Most of this is pretty standard stuff but one thing I did learn is some of the fingerprinting techniques I wouldn't've thought of. Like Mozilla/Apple not sharing GPU or battery information being used to confirm which browser I use even if I fake the User Agent String.
Cider9986 4mo ago
I prefer https://fingerprint.com/demo https://fingerprint.com/demo Terrible company-at least you know you are testing what is being used.
- pixel_popping 4mo ago
  What's terrible about them?
  - Cider9986 4mo ago
    They track us around the web.
    - pixel_popping 4mo ago
      But anybody knows (in tech I mean) that a browser client leak a lot of things and sustained tracking is easy even cross-browsers (and cross-devices too with more advanced techniques), including history (easy to know which websites were visited with timing analysis in loops and iteration), it falls on the responsibility of the user to achieve privacy, but it requires heavy sacrifices that frankly most users are not willing to do, fingerprint.com is really basic and doesn't go to a great length at all actually to track users (fortunately). Reality is that most do not care about privacy (look at the number of Google users, even developers themselves who are completely aware of it and continue to "embrace" the mass tracking). There is also the mass brainwashing which is an issue where people that use VPNs think that they are anonymous and this is terrifying to think (thank you NordVPN non-sense, which also use Google Analytics which then correlate entire traffic later-on, what a joke).
      - Cider9986 4mo ago
        Similarly, just like how somebody would think that a company selling weapons that are expressly used to harm protestors is a terrible company, a company that tracks its users and invades their privacy is a terrible company. We can see that big companies are able to do a great deal for privacy like Cloudflare and Apple (relatively speaking). >Reality is that most do not care about privacy Most people don't understand how much they are being tracked online, and even less know how to start preventing it. The vast majority of people care deeply about privacy. It is a natural human desire. Ask someone that says they have "nothing to hide" if they would be willing to let you install a camera pointed at their bed. Are they doing anything wrong in bed? Anything to hide? No. They still deserve privacy. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. [1] Just because people don't care about the issue doesn't mean they shouldn't have the right by default. Privacy should be the default. It is bad for you to have less privacy because it gives governments, corporations, and other people significant power over you and allows them to harm you more easily. Also it is your right, just like the 1st amendment. [1] Edward Snowden
corobo 4mo ago
Dunno what it is with the wording but my brain started reading it in a bit of a "Hello Clarice" Hannibal Lecter style lol >The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique — like a fingerprint made of letters Is this one true? I've not made any changes to fonts on my phone that I know of, wouldn't it just be bog standard iPhone fonts? Curiosity not challenge Would be cool if you actually did track just to prove the point like "you've opened this page 6 times now, 2 of those were via VPN and one time was using the Firefox Focus browser. Have you found any flaws in the data yet?"
tempodox 4mo ago
If the color scheme weren’t so atrocious, it would almost be possible to read what it says.
pixel_popping 4mo ago
It's really bad, it's not using proper fingerprinting techniques, no network stack fingerprinting, no browser history via DNS poisoning, no narrowing down exact country with timing and so on. I mean this is even inferior from basic tools like amiunique, what's the point?
- camillomiller 4mo ago
  It's a piece of AI slop that this user, with an account created 21 days ago, has been spamming here for the third time.
RHSeeger 4mo ago
> We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did. Bunk. You asked a geolocation api/service to map my ip address back to a location. You _did_ ask for my location, using my IP as a key. And my IP is pretty much required in order for communication on the internet to work (outside of using services to hide it, but then _they_ have your info instead).
- ygjb 4mo ago
  Nah. The browser has a mechanism to request geolocation. This is the ask that was not performed. The user was not asked, which is the important piece. If I have a dictionary, I don't have to ask the meaning of a word I hear from someone I am speaking to, I can look it up in the dictionary. I may infer an incorrect meaning because the word has multiple meanings or is a colloquialism. If I need to clarify that inaccuracy, I need other data points (for example, the context of the conversation), or I can ask my conversational partner for clarification).
  - nozzlegear 4mo ago
    > Nah. The browser has a mechanism to request geolocation. This is the ask that was not performed. The user was not asked, which is the important piece. The geolocation API requires prompting the user for permission before it can be used: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation/getCurrentPosition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...
    - ygjb 4mo ago
      Yes, that would have tripped the prompt asking the user, which would have had explicit user acceptance or refusal. The point is you don't need consent to do a fuzzy match usibg other data in most jurisdictions.
      - nozzlegear 4mo ago
        Ah I see what you're saying. I think the website's wording is just confusing, which made me think you, in turn, were saying something you weren't.
mikeocool 4mo ago
As far as this website reports, I'm undistinguishable from most other Mac users in Brooklyn, New York. Seems like it's not actually highlighting the frightening aspects of fingerprint.
- ygjb 4mo ago
  Yeah, your browser fingerprint might be a needle in a needlestack. You might not be able to distinguish one needle from another needle easily, but if you have enough needle samples you can start to identify what the needles are pointing at. Data aggregators collect enough pseudo-indistinguishable needles to be able to disambiguate and associate them with a known identity or cohort. For example, your mobile browser might be indistinguishable from most other Mac users in Brooklyn, but your mobile browser might be the only one running on a device from an IP address that regularly logs a meal in MyFitnessPal at that Starbucks wi-fi before making Apple Pay/Google Wallet purchase, hits the next 8 stops on the train before connecting to the same cell tower at the narrow window as you enter your office (telling on myself a bit, tho I am in Vancouver, not Brooklyn). Span this across all of your movements and activities across multiple aggregators and it's a trail of movement through a fog of data that is fuzzy, but enough to identify you, or a small cohort of similar users.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
Perhaps this illustrates the ridiculous level to which website operators make assumptions about website visitors This phenonemon is much older than "browser fingerprinting"
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  Opening this page in text-only browser, i.e., no Javascript, CSS, auto-loading resources, etc., it appears to contain zero information about the visitor. Not even an IP address https://web.archive.org/web/20260508131253if_/https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken https://web.archive.org/web/20260508131253if_/https://sincey...
karmakaze 4mo ago
Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies. I looked for better websites, the EFF one[0] is informative. My browser fingerprint was unique among the visitors in the past 45 days. [0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
- tossandthrow 4mo ago
  At least in Europe the gdpr still counts, even when you don't use cookies but fingerprinting. So if you use this information you still need to disclose it and process data in accordance with the law.
  - Rygian 4mo ago
    In my case, the site reports "The technique is called browser fingerprinting. It is legal everywhere." It is definitely not legal in Europe, when used to track individual users. The consent pop-ups are not only about cookies.
    - mwheelz 4mo ago
      [dead]
- globalnode 4mo ago
  id still prefer the information be inaccurate. since sites are rude enough to try and track me, the least i can do is feed them unique garbage.
- ifh-hn 4mo ago
  > Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking. Gotta love Firefox with ublock origin in advanced mode, even without JavaScript disabled so the site worked.
  - eikenberry 4mo ago
    Did you specifically re-enable javascript? Ublock origin on medium mode blocks all the tracking javascript and I'd think advanced would follow the same basic starting point.
GMoromisato 4mo ago
Someone should do a demo where they take all the info from the browser and feed it to an LLM to describe the person as accurately as possible. I bet it would be 10x better than any horoscope.
camillomiller 4mo ago
Another unreadable piece of slop with Claude fonts and style that this user has already spammed three times here with an account created 21 days ago. This is out of control, and y'all just comment these threads as if they're made by humans.
basilikum 4mo ago
> This volume requires JavaScript. That is part of the point — your browser is what is being read. > With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops. What? When I enable JS it shows me a lot of stuff that is only queriable with JS.
nottorp 4mo ago
An instant loading page without animations and more contrast would have been more fun. The fact that it begins with my IP address reminds me of those dubious VPN ads. City is wrong, I may speak English but it's not my native language. As other people said, there are much better pages showing you your browser fingerprint.
- mrguyorama 4mo ago
  And like most people discussing these things, you entirely miss the point. It doesn't matter whether you actually speak english natively or not, nobody cares about the actual values. Web sites don't actually care whether you have a robust font package in some way to discern whether you are a font hipster or something, they are just collecting signals. What matters is that your physical machine and web browser combo report these values about the same way every single time they are probed, and that is used to reliably track YOU, uniquely, with great accuracy, with EVERYTHING you do on the internet, every site you visit, every mouse movement, every purchase linked back to you. Everything. The actual values don't have to match "reality" in any way. It's just about generating bits of signal about your setup.
  - nottorp 4mo ago
    > It doesn't matter whether you actually speak english natively or not So don't you think presenting the info as it's a great uncovered secret and then getting it wrong will lead the layman to disbelieveing everything? Of course, the other extreme is the EFF site that says "Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.33 bits of identifying information.". There must be some middle ground to present this info.
flux3125 4mo ago
At least it doesn't know my age Oh wait
- Ylpertnodi 4mo ago
  Netscape user. Always a giveaway.
skerit 4mo ago
> We know this because your IP address was the first thing your device sent us. First paragraph, and I don't like this wording already. It's as if "my device" has any choice in the matter. And actually, it's the reverse! Often enough your own device does not know your _actual_ public IP address without asking some kind of public service to snitch on your internet connection.
deferredgrant 4mo ago
[flagged]
amarcheschi 4mo ago
You could have used show hn since you made it
internet2000 4mo ago
Yes, I'm on a MacBook Air in Eastern Time and I speak English. I'd have told the website that myself if they had asked it.
- Ylpertnodi 4mo ago
  Eastern Time, USA, or closer to Bangladesh?
pdntspa 4mo ago
Your browser discloses a lot more fingerprinting data than this
jameshart 4mo ago
> Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique The set of fonts available in stock iOS is hardly going to be unique now is it? That it is even possible to install fonts onto iOS would be news to most users.
pimlottc 4mo ago
I can’t even read this on my phone, the text is too small and the contrast is terrible
josefritzishere 4mo ago
This is a great exercise, it's generally accurate on location but it's hard to express how granular they can be Identifying users through browser information. fonts? display size? processor? how unique is that really in laymans terms?
simonbw 4mo ago
It seems like they know I have an iPhone with dark mode enabled, that I speak English, and that I'm in the USA (but wrong city wrong state). I am kinda unimpressed, I'm pretty sure they can get a lot more info than that.
pugworthy 4mo ago
Trying this in Lynx I'm surprised it didn't at least get some information from me in the request headers. You don't need JavaScript to pull things out of them.
Aardwolf 4mo ago
> You came here from news.ycombinator.com. Your browser told us the address of the page you were reading before this one. Every link you follow tells the destination where you were. The page you just left knows you left. This page knows where you came from. Neither was asked. I thought this didn't work anymore and browsers left out the referer in the case of https, is that not so then?
- CCoffie 4mo ago
  I believe you only lose the referer header when switching between http and https.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
donatj 4mo ago
The text legibility of the gray on black is a serious problem. My eyes aren't that bad but I can barely read this.
- rectang 4mo ago
  My eyes aren't great and I had to pinch-zoom to read parts of this page.
noelsusman 4mo ago
I am once again asking privacy advocates to try sounding normal for once. Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything.
- mpalmer 4mo ago
  It's the usual terse LLM voice that makes everything sound dramatic. Nails on a chalkboard
  - thrance 4mo ago
    I can't stand this tone, it's truly the worst way to write, ever. Rapid successions of sentences 5 to 8 words long, where each must be impactful and profound but only end up sounding incredibly smug and abrasive. Fuck that.
- warkdarrior 4mo ago
  > Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything. But I am the only person in this timezone in the world. It uniquely identified me!
  - AlecSchueler 4mo ago
    The claim was that a site could "infer when you sleep, when you work, and when you browse because you cannot sleep." Is that not true? I know that the timing of my HN comments tells a pretty clear story about my schedule having recently looked at a histogram.
- aucisson_masque 4mo ago
  Agree, sending my language, if I use dark mode or time zones is all data that can be used to give me a better experience so I don’t mind.
- Unai 4mo ago
  > You prefer dark interfaces — your operating system told us. oOoOohh my settings worked as intended, spooky!
wickerdan 4mo ago
Its pretty scary when you see it like this
moritzwarhier 4mo ago
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ does the same or better, without AI regurgitation and a WordPress theme.
hackersnooze1 4mo ago
it got both my city and browser wrong i am not too concerned lol
baddash 4mo ago
pretty interesting but why's this website so dramatic, like it thinks it's making me uneasy and paranoid or something
- efilife 4mo ago
  Because it's AI slop. It's the same tone every time
cortesoft 4mo ago
Maybe it's just because I am old, or have worked on internet software for almost 30 years, but none of this seems surprising or even concerning? Someone sets up a server that accepts connections to it and then someone sends a connection request to it. There has been no agreement on anything, no expectations or rules established. No one forces the server to accept any connection request it gets, and no one forces someone to make a connection request to that server. What the server returns and what the client does with that are completely up to each side. I feel like this agreement (or lack thereof?) works both ways. I don't think users should get mad if a website decides to use information about your connection request in anyway it chooses, but I also don't think a website should be able to get mad if I do whatever I want with the data it sends to me. In other words, websites can choose to remember whatever they want about my IP address and my request details, and I can choose to do whatever I want with what they send back to me (i.e. I can block ads or refuse to make followup requests that the site tells me to make, and i can choose to display the response in whatever way i want to) I asked for data, they sent me data. If I don't want them knowing stuff about me, I shouldn't send that stuff in my request. If they don't want me to have that data unless I also display ads, then they should make me agree to that before sending me the data. Of course, I know in practice most people don't understand what their browsers are doing, and there aren't a ton of practical choices for people around what their browser sends, and the internet is no longer an optional thing for a lot of our lives. I also know that things like DDOS attacks and the like make a completely 'anything goes' setup impractical. However, I still have this gut feeling that we shouldn't expect too much from either side when we make an internet request.
- scotty79 4mo ago
  Browser volunteering an angle at which I'm holding my phone is a bit surprising.
  - Matheus28 4mo ago
    Why? Some web apps might want to present a different interface if you’re in landscape.
everdrive 4mo ago
"With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops." This is surely only partially true.
quietsegfault 4mo ago
Jokes on them, they got the wrong IP address, dummies!!! My IP address is 127.0.0.1!
notatoad 4mo ago
the breathless fearmongering but also condescending tone of this really makes it hard to take seriously. yeah, you can "digitally fingerprint" me when i browse the web. do you know when else you can get my fingerprints? literally any time i touch something in the real world, i leave my fingerprints behind. and nobody is making websites telling us all what a risk to privacy that is. if you want to make me afraid of browser fingerprinting, try explaining how that information can be used to harm me. i'm aware that it's possible, i just don't care because it doesn't seem like it's that big of a deal.
Swizec 4mo ago
I love that the very first thing it showed was wrong > San Pablo, California, United States > You appear to be in San Pablo, United States. Your internet provider is AT&T Enterprises, LLC. We know this because your IP address — 108.xxx.xxx.233 — was the first thing your device sent us I am in San Francisco. IPs are not a reliable location identifier and never have been. Especially on mobile. Thank you for coming to my ted talk
mmh0000 4mo ago
Wow! Somebody with ChatGPT discovered the concept of browser headers, then for some odd reason made the verbiage really ... weird "We chose not to tell you"... okay... Anyway, if you really want to know what your browser is sending: https://browserleaks.com/ https://browserleaks.com/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
kykat 4mo ago
Visiting without JS: "With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops." I find this hyper dramatic LLM language extremely off putting, but appreciate the signal that allows me to completely disregard it.
mcintyre1994 4mo ago
> Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique Is this actually true? Because I don’t even know if I have any control over this on iOS, and if I do then I’d guess almost nobody diverges from the default?
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  Fair point, and you're right. On iOS the stock font set is essentially uniform across devices in the same OS version, so the "nearly unique" claim doesn't hold there. Just pushed a hedge: prose now distinguishes between desktop (where fonts accumulate via apps and OS over time, and the bundle is genuinely identifying) and iOS/Android (where it isn't, on its own). Combined with screen + GPU + language + timezone the iOS version still narrows the field, but the prose shouldn't overclaim. Thanks.
sitzkrieg 4mo ago
dark gray on black text was a terrible choice, virtually unreadable contrast
- efilife 4mo ago
  It's Claude that chose this and it doesn't really have eyes, so that's the reason
  - sitzkrieg 4mo ago
    what a terrible reason lol. i should mention i use light mode and it got that wrong to boot
xinan 4mo ago
I wish it knows that I absolutely hate dark modes with such low contrast.
devmor 4mo ago
Wow! A significant amount of that information is wrong. I guess my corporate security is doing their job pretty well.
every 4mo ago
It seems to have a little trouble with lynx... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
binyu 4mo ago
They forgot to add timing attack on images load time which can be used to tell if you visited X website. https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2011/PAPERS/2011/paper010.pdf https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2011/PAPERS/2011/paper010...
- lights0123 4mo ago
  Not since browsers started partitioning caches in 2020: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning/ https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning/
  - binyu 4mo ago
    I don't think this protects from sidechannel/timing attacks applied to images load time completely. Edit: Reading more thoroughly, probably it does to a great extent after all.
bunbun69 4mo ago
Ok… Are we supposed to care?
seydor 4mo ago
I thought the referer was not available under https anymore
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  [dead]
relevant_stats 4mo ago
The stats are wrong - on Android my finger has not moved triple digit times, and I haven't tapped double digit times. In 4 seconds. My general location is also wrong. This site's theme is barely visible. And the entire idea for the site is at least couple decades old. Unoriginal slop.
looneysquash 4mo ago
Would be nice if more people were focus on fixing these issues instead of just a bunch of "we already know", and making fun up the tone of the site. Thanks op for reminding us of the privacy issues with our browsers. The EFF and others already told us, but the issues remain. Lets hope you're hear to stay and fight for our privacy alongside us.
- mwheelz 4mo ago
  Thanks for that. The page isn't trying to tell anyone something they don't already know, it's trying to put it in front of the people who haven't been told. The bug reports today have been gold and the volume is meaningfully better for them.
ShabbyDoo 4mo ago
Access to the available font list might be useful for identifying devices likely issued by a particular organization. Unusual fonts that are part of an org's branding usually are installed as part of a standard device image. This allows employees to produce brand-compliant presentations, etc. I was an intern at GE in the mid-90's and we had a custom font with just one character defined - the "meatball" corporate logo.
mwheelz 4mo ago
[flagged]
nyumat 4mo ago
Another vibe-sloped false-integrity derivative. Cmon, OP..
flint 4mo ago
Something attacked my computer. I shut the page, and some old one popped up. I shut it, and they popped up again I shut my browser, and Notepad++ was filling with <cr><lf> I closed Notepad++, closed every open app, and restarted.
simonw 4mo ago
Cute detail: if you switch to another tab and then back again it shows a banner at the top: > You left for 6.3 seconds. We noticed.
YeGoblynQueenne 4mo ago
Huh? The user mwheelz seems to have been [dead]'d in the time this post has been on the front page. If I look at their comments page, those posted more than 46 minutes ago (at the time of writing) are normally visible and the rest are [dead]. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mwheelz https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mwheelz Mods, is there something we should know? Is there maybe a reason to stay away from the linked website?
- CyberDildonics 4mo ago
  Huhh?? Oh dear, ok but it's because they ai generated everything to make a poor copy of other websites.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
kbigdelysh 4mo ago
So if they can figure out whether I have an expensive laptop/computer based on my graphic card, then they can adjust the prices I see on the page (e.g.higher prices for game devs/players and lower prices for plumbers). Not fair.
barbs 4mo ago
"Your screen is 320 by 568 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display." Not quite, I'm on a 2016 iPhone SE
yard2010 4mo ago
Tell me what kind of smell my last fart had. Now this will be scary.
arkensaw 4mo ago
> You have been on this page for 92 seconds. You scrolled 0% of the way down. You never left this tab. Uhm... how did I get to the bottom if I scrolled 0%?
tristor 4mo ago
None of the information identified for me was surprising using an up-to-date Firefox on Mac w/ a mostly default configuration. I had to unblock Javascript in NoScript for the page to work. I get the point, but I think the EFF Panopticon page is a better representation of browser fingerprinting and how it works, because most of the things shared are really basic elements of data that aren't personally identifiable. You can absolutely fingerprint Firefox with a default config, so obviously this was vibe-coded and just doesn't do much. Cool, you did a GeoIP lookup, read the user-agent, the referrer header, and the accessibility data, exactly zero of that should be surprising to anyone that knows how you access a website.
shepherdjerred 4mo ago
How did you prompt Claude to be so paranoid but also bad at fingerprinting? Of course the browser knows my IP and language. Nothing on this page is really surprising
cyanydeez 4mo ago
hrm. We need a modified browser that just randomly switches the finger prints for linkndin.
D2OQZG8l5BI1S06 4mo ago
AI really has a problem picking proper fonts, this is barely readable...
byhemechi 4mo ago
Unreadable and useless vibe coded shit. Submissions like this are why I've all but stopped using HN
- LPisGood 4mo ago
  I didn’t find it unreadable. It was pretty neat in my opinion.
  - byhemechi 4mo ago
    45% grey text on a 10% grey background set in a light serif font.
MrDresden 4mo ago
Yet even with all this information most webpages still insist on showing me the language version of the country who's IP address I have rather than, you know, using the preferred language selection. It's almost like web devs don't know the concept of traveling outside ones county.
doondoob 4mo ago
The biggest annoying thing was the clearly AI written doom-voice. Why did this make the front page?
y42 4mo ago
Shameless plug: It's not that fancy but follows the same principle: https://institut-fdh.de/?2026-aya https://institut-fdh.de/?2026-aya There's also this well known page which does the exact same thing in a more ordered way: https://browserleaks.com/ https://browserleaks.com/
ritwik310 4mo ago
[dead]
cadamsdotcom 4mo ago
Whoever made this page, you need to rip out the fade in animation. I lasted 4 seconds on your page.

625 points by mwheelz 4mo ago

good stuff but useful for non tech ppl. We already knew those things are exposed by the browser. probably worth putting in x/reddit

____tom____ 4mo ago

I doubt the fonts on my iPhone identify me. As far as I know, they would be the fonts it came with. Or can apps install fonts?

rassimmoc 4mo ago

[dead]

nick49488171 4mo ago

The gyroscope and battery should not be getting exposed without permission. That seems unexpectedly invasive, and I'm in tech. Also we should disable referrer field.

reenorap 4mo ago

How do we get our browser to stop sending all this information? It's really maddening.

chainingsolid 4mo ago
2/3 of the big browsers are open source, you could just change it this year! (Assuming your mobile device isn't from the former personal computer company turned status symbol manufacturer). Harder problem is getting the economic system that relies on this information swapped out. Have fun when 99% of web doesn't 'work'.
al_borland 4mo ago
I tried it with a VPN running and in the Mullvad browser and it got all the big stuff wrong. Where are you was sent to another location due to the VPN, this was all it really impacted. When you arrived was wrong because of the Mullvad browser, even without the VPN enabled it reports that I'm in Reykjavik, which I'm not. What you brought with you, it got the resolution wrong, as the browser locks itself to various resolutions to prevent this kind of fingerprinting. GPU and Battery both say "kept back", I assume this means it couldn't get anything, because when I run in Safari it says Apple GPU.

superkuh 4mo ago

With javascript off it just stalls at "reading" forever. There are certainly some viewport properties and other things it does know even without JS execution, but the mitigation is significant. And the page itself (the JS application) cannot act on that data or communicate it. Instead it has to be processed by some other application on the backend or wherever. Not in my browser by my computer.

Steve16384 4mo ago
I can't help feeling that if you're turning JS off, you might as well turn off your computer to protect your data.
- andai 4mo ago
  Nah, HTTP logs still leak my circadian rhythm.
- MarkusQ 4mo ago
  That's actually a fantastic idea! Oh wait, no, I'm an e-addict. Drat! Curse this monkey!
- dylan604 4mo ago
  As an experiment, I made a small retail shop (< 30 products) that would use JS for modern style async/await calls, but would then use old school POSTs if JS was disabled with full page reloads on every POST. it sucked to dev and as UX, but it was possible to do. Had the non-JS POST style updates been any less annoying, it might have been viable. Nobody likes full reloads. They suck. JS can do nice things for UX. It's just that we can't have nice things because people suck
  - efreak 4mo ago
    That's what frames are for. Only reload the frame with the important data in it (total cost, list of products in cart) and point the category links in the page to open in the same frame as the shopping cart. You can even style the frame contents with the main page's stylesheet so it only needs to load a `$41.29` total if that's all that's changed.

mrpopo 4mo ago

Happy to say that my browser didn't tell anything that I didn't expect it to. It even identified my IP from a location 1000km away from me. Firefox on Android with ublock

wincy 4mo ago

My battery is at NaN%, the site is cool but it should probably change the text if I’m not actually exposing that information. It got the city wrong but close to where I live. This stuff would be wildly wrong if I fired up my VPN. Although its annoying when I connected to a VPN to Steam it’ll often show my prices in Canadian dollars instead of USD.

freedomben 4mo ago
Heh, my battery (which I don't have cause this is a desktop) is at 100% apparently
- dylan604 4mo ago
  Battery: kept back Your browser kept your battery level back. Firefox removed this API entirely in 2016, after researchers proved it could be used to track a visitor across websites without cookies, without consent. The API still exists in the specification. It was simply hidden — from you, and from any page that might ask after it. Well, at least something positive from the shit I take for not sheepling my way through life using Chrome
  - llbbdd 4mo ago
    I got this message and I'm on Chrome, on a laptop. I tested in the console on that site and was able to get the battery level though, so I'm pretty sure their check is just broken.
    - mwheelz 4mo ago
      [dead]
    - efreak 4mo ago
      Might be bugged or you might have some setting that doesn't allow websites to use it. Try https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/battery-status/ https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/battery-status/

Multicomp 4mo ago

Mine told me my graphics card was "or similar" so my stock Firefox is doing at least okay. While I still follow the general privacy first tenets, I have ended up backing off on some tools (noscript and librewolf) at the extremes of privacy because if every site is going to track everything by my IP or by my ASN or browser fingerprint, I do have a happy medium of being private enough while not being utterly broken in my browsing. Roughly that looks like email aliases on demand via sieve rules, ublock origin with liberal use of filter lists, different handles and a password manager, frozen credit ratings, and Tailscale exit nodes or Mozilla(Mullvad) VPN for uncontrolled WiFi access points for my jnrootabke android device and mostly signal for comms. I'm getting to old to be a privacy extreme enthusiast when all of my family side channels everything straight to Facebook, so this is the impure level of privacy I can sustain.

Milpotel 4mo ago
Same for me, also the "screen" size is off (just shows window size), the location is off by hundreds of kilometres and other information is quite generic (battery level "kept back", small set of standard fonts available...).

freedomben 4mo ago

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it gives my exact GPU, but that was surprising to me. Just so everyone knows, its an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT and I paid way too much for it during the covid/crypto price explosion when they were sold out everywhere. Still a bit raw about that, but it is an excellent card on Linux (fedora)

scragz 4mo ago
you are using a Radeon RX 6900 XT on Fedora Linux. we know this because you admitted it in the previous comment.
ape4 4mo ago
Yeah the exact kind shouldn't matter - just the WebGL capabilities.
dylan604 4mo ago
"Your graphics processor identified itself as or similar" guess mine isn't such a specific model as yours. so I don't have a real GPU, i have something similar to a GPU??? did I get a knock off Alibaba version?
- stusmall 4mo ago
  I got "or similar" from Firefox and exact make and model from chrome. Probably a browser issue and not a hardware issue.
  - dylan604 4mo ago
    not regretting choice of browser at all
  - mwheelz 4mo ago
    Confirmed. Firefox's privacy hardening returns "Mozilla, or similar" or just "Mozilla" as the renderer string. Chrome doesn't (yet). My parser was treating the Firefox string as if it were ANGLE format and grabbing the wrong half. Fixed.

aidanbeck 4mo ago

Aside from the fingerprinting methods, the graphics processor string seems to be the most immediately personal data given up (other than location, which was incorrect for me). I could see sites tailoring ads around an assumed class, income, and level of digital literacy based on this data point alone.

chrisweekly 4mo ago

I appreciate the intent here, so this is constructive feedback: - Some of the numbers are off, eg "Your browser allocated 39322 MB of storage to this page alone" - low contrast in dark mode makes text hard to read

mwheelz 4mo ago
The 39 GB number is a bug. I was reading quota (browser allow-up-to ceiling) and calling it "allocated." Fixed; pushing now. Contrast is intentional but I hear you. not changing it but noted, and a cleaner reading mode is on the to-do later.
- topham 4mo ago
  Contrast is a violation of accessibility guidelines.
  - warkdarrior 4mo ago
    This site is already violating your privacy. Do you think they care about your accessibility needs?
    - topham 4mo ago
      The site isn't violating your privacy.

yakkomajuri 4mo ago

DuckDuckGo browser helped mask some stuff, but definitely a fair amount still goes through. Annoyingly the web is becoming a bit more annoying to browse as a DuckDuckGo (mobile) and Brave (desktop) user. With a VPN on top it gets even worse.

ebolyen 4mo ago

There's really a lot more you can look at here. Lot's a prior art on super-cookies and fingerprinting: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://amiunique.org/ https://amiunique.org/

cf100clunk 4mo ago
Another info leakage feedback tool: https://www.ipleak.com/full-report/ https://www.ipleak.com/full-report/
mwheelz 4mo ago
Both linked in the Sources & Confessions modal at the bottom. Cover Your Tracks is the spiritual ancestor of this whole piece. amiunique is more rigorous; this is the editorial cousin.
- cf100clunk 4mo ago
  Brutally dark site doesn't seem to show much to my eyes. No modal appearing at the bottom.
nottorp 4mo ago
Hmm interesting. I tried the EFF site and among other things it told me I'm on "MacIntel". Gave me a scare, thought I'm still somehow running an x86 build of Firefox.

Gualdrapo 4mo ago

Text is so dim is really hard to read.

O1111OOO 4mo ago
If you're on FF, this could be helpful for these kinds of sites (I use it all the time): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/site-color-changer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/site-color-ch...

card_zero 4mo ago

* I'm not in that city. * It's running a kind of Chrome on a kind of Linux, at a stretch. * Nobody can infer when I work and when I sleep. That includes me. * The recent, high-end display is the screen of a low-end tablet I bought in a supermarket five years ago. * But yes, browser fingerprinting is annoying. * Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?

cush 4mo ago
The amount of fingerprinting this page reveals pales in comparison to what actually happens in the wild
- jwally 4mo ago
  its ease is also vastly inflated. If it was as simple as this site makes it out to be, companies like fingerprint.com don't exist.
  - shimman 4mo ago
    Don't know about easy but their JS lib doing this is quite good: https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs Honestly surprised to see it licensed as MIT now too. It was something less permissive before. They aren't doing anything too crazy, more like being the first ones to be open about it. I couldn't imagine what else companies like Google or Meta or TikTok can extract out of it that no one else can't. Integrations aren't exactly hard to make, quality is hard yes, but making half assed plumbing is sufficient too. Those advertisers benefit from monopolistic markets with zero regulation while owning the platforms they sell advertising on that requires their explicit malware in order to use, what is unique about their finger printing versus what fingerprintjs provides?
    - bdelmas 4mo ago
      I knew about this library but is it legal in the EU? Because that library works very well

ramon156 4mo ago

Its mixing confidential info. For example, you know I'm connected from a location, but you do not know my precise location. I connected from a tower that is from Odido, but I am not paying Odido for a subscription.

mwheelz 4mo ago
Right, IP-to-geo is approximate and gets a lot of cases wrong (yours among them). Most ad networks use it as a region/DMA hint, and not precise positioning. The point of including it isn't precision. It's that any location is more than nothing, and the visitor never opted in.

thatguy0900 4mo ago

Man what a awful looking site. I shouldn't have to crank my brightness to max to kind of read the words

fodkodrasz 4mo ago
I agree, this site is an eyesore. I use windows color filters (Grayscale inverted is my preferred, in the past I used plain inverted) for poor man's dark mode (or light mode in this case) for stuff that doesn't honor my color scheme and hurts my eyes. It also has a hotkey, so it is really handy sometimes, but you need to enable it in the settings. Assistive technologies are great, not only because they benefit those who have no choice but to rely on them, but also they can benefit the luckier people.

aziaziazi 4mo ago

> Your screen is 320 by 568 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display. It’s been a long time my 2016’ iPhone as been called recent or high-end but I’ll take the compliment, thank-you.

chainingsolid 4mo ago
Ya, I'm not running my Pinephone's display at x2 cause its a high end display on a $200 phone.....

crazygringo 4mo ago

This is just... silly. Everything it told me, while browsing on my iPhone, seems entirely reasonable. > Every page you have ever visited knows at least this much. Most of them know more. None of them told you. So? Why would I want the news site I'm visiting to "tell me" it knows my preferred language, that I'm using light mode, or the estimated location of my IP address...? It's not surprising that a browser which renders text can be used to identify which fonts are available. It's not surprising that a browser which allows calculation with your GPU will identify your type of GPU. The "without asking" framing is just silly. I expect to be asked for consent to use my webcam or microphone or exact precise location. But the last thing I want is to be asked for permission around detecting my local time zone or preferred language or my screen resolution or 20 other totally reasonable things for a website to be able to know.

mwheelz 4mo ago
Right that most of these aren't surprises individually, and right that nobody wants a permission prompt for Accept-Language. The argument isn't that you should, it's that the combination is enough to identify you across sites without your awareness, and that the wider tracking ecosystem trades on that bundle. The piece is editorial about the thing existing, not a proposal to gate every header. Reasonable to push back if you find the bundle isn't the point.
- crazygringo 4mo ago
  Fingerprinting has exited for a long time. But this site is specifically saying "None of them told you". The site does seem to be implying that disclosure and consent are the issues: > We did not ask for your location. > Nothing about this was requested. The information arrived on its own. > Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection. It will do this again on the next page you visit, and the one after that. > No permission is required. It's framing this as if browsers are maliciously volunteering information that ought to be protected, and that sites are maliciously hiding the information available to them. It does seem to be clearly suggesting that even basic pieces of information ought to be available only upon request and that this must be disclosed to users. You say this is "not a proposal to gate every header", but it's sure looking like something close to that to me.

Retr0id 4mo ago

> Your screen is 1512 by 982 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display. Your device volunteered all of this in the first milliseconds of the connection. No it didn't. It was queried by the JS running on the page. It's a fun demo but it could really do without the slop prose.

mwheelz 4mo ago
Pedantic but right. The JS queries them; the browser returns them without prompting the user. "Volunteered" is the editorial verb for that round-trip but it does paper over a layer.
- Retr0id 4mo ago
  It's relevant because connection-level fingerprinting is directly visible to intermediaries like cloudflare.
pixel_popping 4mo ago
Yeah, no need JS to track resolution or even mouse movements with timing, pure HTML/CSS can do.

troyvit 4mo ago

> Your graphics processor identified itself as or similar. That checks out. I think what I have is similar to a graphics card but isn't quite.

wlesieutre 4mo ago
My GPU identification is off by about a decade but it did get the brand right
- Sohcahtoa82 4mo ago
  Seriously. My laptop was manufactured last year, and the site identified it as a Radeon R9 200 series. That was a top-of-the-line GPU...back in 2014.
  - wlesieutre 4mo ago
    Same ID for mine. Are you running Firefox? Maybe that's a lie it tells to fingerprinters.
    - mrguyorama 4mo ago
      I am running Firefox. Firefox does not report you GPU according to the site, instead returning a generic "Mozilla" GPU. More of you should be running current Firefox. It actually has serious engineering work going into protecting you from web tracking. I work for a team entirely dependent on web tracking for Fraud prevention. The things Firefox does work to protect you and make our job harder. They genuinely make it harder for websites to track you. Other things that genuinely help: Apple private relay. Some VPNs. Generated unique credit cards.

pona-a 4mo ago

A vibe-coded EFF Cover Your Tracks. The fact this made it to front-page is spookier than its contents

camillomiller 4mo ago
Yes! By a user who’s 21 days old, has never commented and it’s not even following this thread as he has absolutely never replied and never will. Having these kind of submissions not flagged is killing hacker news
- EricBetts 4mo ago
  I think at least they're following the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064959
- serial_dev 4mo ago
  I disagree, the discussion is still interesting to me. The page might be low quality AI slop (though it claims it’s not), I did find the discussion about it informative to a degree.
moritzwarhier 4mo ago
exactly, it even looks like a page created by someone asked to "replicate this, non-obviously, add fancy landing page theme". Fugly.

joshstrange 4mo ago

It's somewhat interesting but over half of what it talked about is just silly. - Reverse IP/geocode (while be cute about "we won't show your IP", oh no, not my IP!) - Timezone - Ok, yeah, lots of websites need/make use of that for completely legit tasks - Browser/OS/Screen size - boring, again mostly needed or historical - GPU - Again, not super interesting IMHO - Battery - Ok, this is the first one I think should be behind a permission dialog - Language - Come off it, that's just table stakes - Fonts - Again, not sure how else this should work in a "perfect" world - Cookies/dark mode/DnT/etc - Ehh, again aside from fingerprinting (which ruins everything) these are all QoL improvements IMHO - Referrer - Again, this is just how the web works I think the websites that take all of that and show you a fingerprint or show the data in a more data-oriented way are way more compelling. This, almost certainly vibe-coded, website doesn't do anything novel and hits on a huge pet peeve of mine: using low-quality arguments for a legit issue (fingerprinting). By mixing in stuff like your IP/Language on the same level as Battery/GPU/other-fingerprinty-things it makes the whole argument less compelling.

mwheelz 4mo ago
Fair pushback, and partially right. Most of these data points are individually defensible. Accept-Language helps with localization, Referer is just how links work, timezone is universally useful. The page's argument isn't that any single one is bad; it's that the bundle is identifying. Panopticlick / Cover Your Tracks measures combinatorial uniqueness, not any single point. The piece could be sharper about the distinction. Noted.
thesuitonym 4mo ago
I'm with you on almost all of this, but since you (almost) asked, here's how I think fonts should work: The server tells your browser to display a line of text in a specific font. If that font is available, your browser does so, and if not, it displays the text in your default font, or a backup font if the developer specified one. There's no need for the server to know if it's there or not.
- Sophira 4mo ago
  That's essentially how things used to work, and the problem is that it too can be gamed using JavaScript. For example, a relatively naive approach might be: 1. Make an HTML <span> element that contains "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" written in the default font. 2. You can't query what font that was, but you can use the getComputedStyle() DOM function of that element to work out the width (for example) of the resulting element. Note this down. 3. Do the same for all the different fonts that you want to test. 4. If any element's width differs from the default's noted in step 2, then the corresponding font is guaranteed to be installed on your system. As written, this won't detect the font that the user has selected to be the default font (because it won't detect the width as being different). However, you can work around this (and remove most false negatives to boot) by a simple addition: 5. Pick one of the fonts that you detected as being installed. 6. Create more elements (as in step 1) that correspond to all the fonts that were detected as being the same width as the default, but have the font you selected in step 5 as a fallback. (eg. 'font-family: Testing, Fallback;') 7. Any element with a width that differs from the font you selected in step 5 is installed on the system. What you get will be a relatively complete list of what fonts are on the system out of the ones you tested. If you want more accuracy, you can do a similar thing with individual letters instead.

nathanmills 4mo ago

You can't gaurentee any of this is fingerprintable without checking twice (i.e. give the user a unique url, then ask them to restart the browser and visit it). In privacy browsers like LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser this is almost all spoofed, save for things like the IP which needs to be hidden/changed independently of the browser.

mwheelz 4mo ago
Correct on rigor. Proving a fingerprint requires the two-visit protocol you describe. The page doesn't actually compute a stable fingerprint or attempt to track returning visitors, it shows you the signals that go into one. The barcode at the bottom is deterministic from the data shown but isn't compared against anything stored. Sloppier than a real fingerprinting tool, by design.

romanows 4mo ago

Lol, the description text is so dramatic.

carimura 4mo ago

Aren't LLMs smart enough to choose better color contrast by now?

nosioptar 4mo ago
Not when they've been trained on low contrast garbage.

IdiotSavage 4mo ago

> Where you were before > news.ycombinator.com This has always bothered me the most. I disabled the 'Referer' header once, but it breaks many websites.

mwheelz 4mo ago
The Referer header is the one that's hardest to opt out of cleanly, strip it at the network level and too many things break. Referrer-Policy lets the origin set the rule, but the visitor doesn't get to choose. There's a quiet move toward Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin as a sane default in modern browsers but it's still origin-dictated, not visitor-dictated.
- pessimizer 4mo ago
  I strip/forge it with a old, probably outdated firefox extension (Referer Control.) But you still got news.ycombinator.com. How? I thought the extension was broken, but it's not. That was actually my only surprise, everything else I was expecting. edit: ignore this, looks like I just needed to save my preferences again. Thanks for showing me that I have been leaking my referer for some mysterious amount of time.
exe34 4mo ago
Hah I remember the picture of the scrotum.
al_borland 4mo ago
It's interesting that this breaks things. When trying to link to an internal password vault at work it would always break. People would have to click the link on my site, then reload it to get the page to load. This wan an issue for years, across multiple versions and despite many people offering up ideas to help solve it. One day I thought maybe it was a referrer issue, so I had it open with noopener,noreferrer, and that fix it. It seems odd that any site would require a user come from somewhere.
IdiotSavage 4mo ago
I just found a new(?) setting in Firefox, to spoof the Referer header, instead of omitting it. Will try that for a while and see how it works. about:config -> network.http.referer.spoofSource

lucideer 4mo ago

The website is pretty & the overdramatic copy is fun, but there's much better fingerprinting demos out there. The number of data points shown here is low - there's plenty more it could be checking - & a good number of them seem to be wrong (it's only detecting one as explicitly "withheld" but I believe a few of them actually are, leading to garbled output). Needs some QA.

InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
The overdramatic tone is pretty funny. "You are in [wrong city]. We could send a team on ninjas to kill you right now, but we chose not to. You are welcome."
acid__ 4mo ago
In short, another AI-generated slop project. I've seen this exact UI style a dozen times now and it's always accompanied with tell-tale overly verbose, overly dramatic text.

rappatic 4mo ago

Vibecoded slop with LLM-written copy. When will it stop

efilife 4mo ago
We desperately need some tagging system/convention here. Maybe just putting [AI] into the title. This bullshit is getting really tiring. It looks like this is an ad by the way, check op's posting history
- camillomiller 4mo ago
  All these submissions come from bots, and users with accounts younger than a month with one single submission (in this case three times the same submission). Maybe the system should block anyone with lower than xyz points and 20 comments to post any link? I dunno, I guess it's hard but this shit is really affecting the community.
none_to_remain 4mo ago
According to the "Sources" popup, creator can't even excuse the slop as AI slop: > The prose > Hand-written · Template-based, not generative > Every sentence on this page was written by Matt. The code selects among prose templates based on what your browser returned. No language model writes or rewrites anything at runtime. If a condition is not covered by hand-written prose, the page stays quiet about it — we'd rather say less than say something false.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

sgarrity 4mo ago

I'm not worried about my privacy. No one can read the dark text on that page anyhow.

efilife 4mo ago

We've seen tens of pages like this, all done better. Now the vibe coders got into it and completely fuck up the idea.

htx80nerd 4mo ago

[flagged]

mwheelz 4mo ago

Update: I pushed two rounds of fixes for things people caught. 1. GPU "or similar" stranded prose. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" as the masked renderer string and my parser was grabbing the second half. Masked-GPU case now gets its own observation. 2. Desktop battery showing NaN/100%. Chromium reports a phantom 100%-charging battery on machines without one; my filter was too narrow. Stricter check, falls through to "kept back." 3. Storage quota of 39+ GB reading as implausible. Now expressed in GB, and the prose was reworded ("would let this page write up to" rather than "allocated to"). 4. Screen size matching window size (Firefox letterboxing / Brave farbling). Page now names it: "your browser appears to be returning the viewport in place of the real screen — anti-fingerprinting at work." 5. "Recent, high-end display" being claimed on old retina devices (iPhone 5-class). Tightened the heuristic. 6. No-JS hangs at "reading." <noscript> block added. Worth saying directly since it came up. The prose is hand-written. Each observation has a small set of templated registers and the code selects among them based on what the data returns. There is no LLM in the runtime path. AI helped me iterate on the spec like it does for most projects now. The sentences on the page are mine. If that's not the kind of work you're in the mood for, fair, but the slop charge is wrong.

pixel_popping 4mo ago
But why don't you show real tracking capabilities? Not what's accessible via the browser directly and legally :/

culi 4mo ago

Most of this is pretty standard stuff but one thing I did learn is some of the fingerprinting techniques I wouldn't've thought of. Like Mozilla/Apple not sharing GPU or battery information being used to confirm which browser I use even if I fake the User Agent String.

Cider9986 4mo ago

I prefer https://fingerprint.com/demo https://fingerprint.com/demo Terrible company-at least you know you are testing what is being used.

pixel_popping 4mo ago
What's terrible about them?
- Cider9986 4mo ago
  They track us around the web.
  - pixel_popping 4mo ago
    But anybody knows (in tech I mean) that a browser client leak a lot of things and sustained tracking is easy even cross-browsers (and cross-devices too with more advanced techniques), including history (easy to know which websites were visited with timing analysis in loops and iteration), it falls on the responsibility of the user to achieve privacy, but it requires heavy sacrifices that frankly most users are not willing to do, fingerprint.com is really basic and doesn't go to a great length at all actually to track users (fortunately). Reality is that most do not care about privacy (look at the number of Google users, even developers themselves who are completely aware of it and continue to "embrace" the mass tracking). There is also the mass brainwashing which is an issue where people that use VPNs think that they are anonymous and this is terrifying to think (thank you NordVPN non-sense, which also use Google Analytics which then correlate entire traffic later-on, what a joke).
    - Cider9986 4mo ago
      Similarly, just like how somebody would think that a company selling weapons that are expressly used to harm protestors is a terrible company, a company that tracks its users and invades their privacy is a terrible company. We can see that big companies are able to do a great deal for privacy like Cloudflare and Apple (relatively speaking). >Reality is that most do not care about privacy Most people don't understand how much they are being tracked online, and even less know how to start preventing it. The vast majority of people care deeply about privacy. It is a natural human desire. Ask someone that says they have "nothing to hide" if they would be willing to let you install a camera pointed at their bed. Are they doing anything wrong in bed? Anything to hide? No. They still deserve privacy. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. [1] Just because people don't care about the issue doesn't mean they shouldn't have the right by default. Privacy should be the default. It is bad for you to have less privacy because it gives governments, corporations, and other people significant power over you and allows them to harm you more easily. Also it is your right, just like the 1st amendment. [1] Edward Snowden

corobo 4mo ago

Dunno what it is with the wording but my brain started reading it in a bit of a "Hello Clarice" Hannibal Lecter style lol >The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique — like a fingerprint made of letters Is this one true? I've not made any changes to fonts on my phone that I know of, wouldn't it just be bog standard iPhone fonts? Curiosity not challenge Would be cool if you actually did track just to prove the point like "you've opened this page 6 times now, 2 of those were via VPN and one time was using the Firefox Focus browser. Have you found any flaws in the data yet?"

tempodox 4mo ago

If the color scheme weren’t so atrocious, it would almost be possible to read what it says.

pixel_popping 4mo ago

It's really bad, it's not using proper fingerprinting techniques, no network stack fingerprinting, no browser history via DNS poisoning, no narrowing down exact country with timing and so on. I mean this is even inferior from basic tools like amiunique, what's the point?

camillomiller 4mo ago
It's a piece of AI slop that this user, with an account created 21 days ago, has been spamming here for the third time.

RHSeeger 4mo ago

> We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did. Bunk. You asked a geolocation api/service to map my ip address back to a location. You _did_ ask for my location, using my IP as a key. And my IP is pretty much required in order for communication on the internet to work (outside of using services to hide it, but then _they_ have your info instead).

ygjb 4mo ago
Nah. The browser has a mechanism to request geolocation. This is the ask that was not performed. The user was not asked, which is the important piece. If I have a dictionary, I don't have to ask the meaning of a word I hear from someone I am speaking to, I can look it up in the dictionary. I may infer an incorrect meaning because the word has multiple meanings or is a colloquialism. If I need to clarify that inaccuracy, I need other data points (for example, the context of the conversation), or I can ask my conversational partner for clarification).
- nozzlegear 4mo ago
  > Nah. The browser has a mechanism to request geolocation. This is the ask that was not performed. The user was not asked, which is the important piece. The geolocation API requires prompting the user for permission before it can be used: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation/getCurrentPosition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...
  - ygjb 4mo ago
    Yes, that would have tripped the prompt asking the user, which would have had explicit user acceptance or refusal. The point is you don't need consent to do a fuzzy match usibg other data in most jurisdictions.
    - nozzlegear 4mo ago
      Ah I see what you're saying. I think the website's wording is just confusing, which made me think you, in turn, were saying something you weren't.

mikeocool 4mo ago

As far as this website reports, I'm undistinguishable from most other Mac users in Brooklyn, New York. Seems like it's not actually highlighting the frightening aspects of fingerprint.

ygjb 4mo ago
Yeah, your browser fingerprint might be a needle in a needlestack. You might not be able to distinguish one needle from another needle easily, but if you have enough needle samples you can start to identify what the needles are pointing at. Data aggregators collect enough pseudo-indistinguishable needles to be able to disambiguate and associate them with a known identity or cohort. For example, your mobile browser might be indistinguishable from most other Mac users in Brooklyn, but your mobile browser might be the only one running on a device from an IP address that regularly logs a meal in MyFitnessPal at that Starbucks wi-fi before making Apple Pay/Google Wallet purchase, hits the next 8 stops on the train before connecting to the same cell tower at the narrow window as you enter your office (telling on myself a bit, tho I am in Vancouver, not Brooklyn). Span this across all of your movements and activities across multiple aggregators and it's a trail of movement through a fog of data that is fuzzy, but enough to identify you, or a small cohort of similar users.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago

Perhaps this illustrates the ridiculous level to which website operators make assumptions about website visitors This phenonemon is much older than "browser fingerprinting"

1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
Opening this page in text-only browser, i.e., no Javascript, CSS, auto-loading resources, etc., it appears to contain zero information about the visitor. Not even an IP address https://web.archive.org/web/20260508131253if_/https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken https://web.archive.org/web/20260508131253if_/https://sincey...

karmakaze 4mo ago

Whether or not the information is accurate isn't really the point. It's that it serves as a way to identify you even without cookies. I looked for better websites, the EFF one[0] is informative. My browser fingerprint was unique among the visitors in the past 45 days. [0] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

tossandthrow 4mo ago
At least in Europe the gdpr still counts, even when you don't use cookies but fingerprinting. So if you use this information you still need to disclose it and process data in accordance with the law.
- Rygian 4mo ago
  In my case, the site reports "The technique is called browser fingerprinting. It is legal everywhere." It is definitely not legal in Europe, when used to track individual users. The consent pop-ups are not only about cookies.
  - mwheelz 4mo ago
    [dead]
globalnode 4mo ago
id still prefer the information be inaccurate. since sites are rude enough to try and track me, the least i can do is feed them unique garbage.
ifh-hn 4mo ago
> Our tests indicate that you have strong protection against Web tracking. Gotta love Firefox with ublock origin in advanced mode, even without JavaScript disabled so the site worked.
- eikenberry 4mo ago
  Did you specifically re-enable javascript? Ublock origin on medium mode blocks all the tracking javascript and I'd think advanced would follow the same basic starting point.

GMoromisato 4mo ago

Someone should do a demo where they take all the info from the browser and feed it to an LLM to describe the person as accurately as possible. I bet it would be 10x better than any horoscope.

camillomiller 4mo ago

Another unreadable piece of slop with Claude fonts and style that this user has already spammed three times here with an account created 21 days ago. This is out of control, and y'all just comment these threads as if they're made by humans.

basilikum 4mo ago

> This volume requires JavaScript. That is part of the point — your browser is what is being read. > With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops. What? When I enable JS it shows me a lot of stuff that is only queriable with JS.

nottorp 4mo ago

An instant loading page without animations and more contrast would have been more fun. The fact that it begins with my IP address reminds me of those dubious VPN ads. City is wrong, I may speak English but it's not my native language. As other people said, there are much better pages showing you your browser fingerprint.

mrguyorama 4mo ago
And like most people discussing these things, you entirely miss the point. It doesn't matter whether you actually speak english natively or not, nobody cares about the actual values. Web sites don't actually care whether you have a robust font package in some way to discern whether you are a font hipster or something, they are just collecting signals. What matters is that your physical machine and web browser combo report these values about the same way every single time they are probed, and that is used to reliably track YOU, uniquely, with great accuracy, with EVERYTHING you do on the internet, every site you visit, every mouse movement, every purchase linked back to you. Everything. The actual values don't have to match "reality" in any way. It's just about generating bits of signal about your setup.
- nottorp 4mo ago
  > It doesn't matter whether you actually speak english natively or not So don't you think presenting the info as it's a great uncovered secret and then getting it wrong will lead the layman to disbelieveing everything? Of course, the other extreme is the EFF site that says "Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.33 bits of identifying information.". There must be some middle ground to present this info.

flux3125 4mo ago

At least it doesn't know my age Oh wait

Ylpertnodi 4mo ago
Netscape user. Always a giveaway.

skerit 4mo ago

> We know this because your IP address was the first thing your device sent us. First paragraph, and I don't like this wording already. It's as if "my device" has any choice in the matter. And actually, it's the reverse! Often enough your own device does not know your _actual_ public IP address without asking some kind of public service to snitch on your internet connection.

deferredgrant 4mo ago

[flagged]

amarcheschi 4mo ago

You could have used show hn since you made it

internet2000 4mo ago

Yes, I'm on a MacBook Air in Eastern Time and I speak English. I'd have told the website that myself if they had asked it.

Ylpertnodi 4mo ago
Eastern Time, USA, or closer to Bangladesh?

pdntspa 4mo ago

Your browser discloses a lot more fingerprinting data than this

jameshart 4mo ago

> Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique The set of fonts available in stock iOS is hardly going to be unique now is it? That it is even possible to install fonts onto iOS would be news to most users.

pimlottc 4mo ago

I can’t even read this on my phone, the text is too small and the contrast is terrible

josefritzishere 4mo ago

This is a great exercise, it's generally accurate on location but it's hard to express how granular they can be Identifying users through browser information. fonts? display size? processor? how unique is that really in laymans terms?

simonbw 4mo ago

It seems like they know I have an iPhone with dark mode enabled, that I speak English, and that I'm in the USA (but wrong city wrong state). I am kinda unimpressed, I'm pretty sure they can get a lot more info than that.

pugworthy 4mo ago

Trying this in Lynx I'm surprised it didn't at least get some information from me in the request headers. You don't need JavaScript to pull things out of them.

Aardwolf 4mo ago

> You came here from news.ycombinator.com. Your browser told us the address of the page you were reading before this one. Every link you follow tells the destination where you were. The page you just left knows you left. This page knows where you came from. Neither was asked. I thought this didn't work anymore and browsers left out the referer in the case of https, is that not so then?

CCoffie 4mo ago
I believe you only lose the referer header when switching between http and https.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

donatj 4mo ago

The text legibility of the gray on black is a serious problem. My eyes aren't that bad but I can barely read this.

rectang 4mo ago
My eyes aren't great and I had to pinch-zoom to read parts of this page.

noelsusman 4mo ago

I am once again asking privacy advocates to try sounding normal for once. Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything.

mpalmer 4mo ago
It's the usual terse LLM voice that makes everything sound dramatic. Nails on a chalkboard
- thrance 4mo ago
  I can't stand this tone, it's truly the worst way to write, ever. Rapid successions of sentences 5 to 8 words long, where each must be impactful and profound but only end up sounding incredibly smug and abrasive. Fuck that.
warkdarrior 4mo ago
> Trying to make a browser accessing your timezone sound nefarious isn't going to convince anyone of anything. But I am the only person in this timezone in the world. It uniquely identified me!
- AlecSchueler 4mo ago
  The claim was that a site could "infer when you sleep, when you work, and when you browse because you cannot sleep." Is that not true? I know that the timing of my HN comments tells a pretty clear story about my schedule having recently looked at a histogram.
aucisson_masque 4mo ago
Agree, sending my language, if I use dark mode or time zones is all data that can be used to give me a better experience so I don’t mind.
Unai 4mo ago
> You prefer dark interfaces — your operating system told us. oOoOohh my settings worked as intended, spooky!

wickerdan 4mo ago

Its pretty scary when you see it like this

moritzwarhier 4mo ago

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ does the same or better, without AI regurgitation and a WordPress theme.

hackersnooze1 4mo ago

it got both my city and browser wrong i am not too concerned lol

baddash 4mo ago

pretty interesting but why's this website so dramatic, like it thinks it's making me uneasy and paranoid or something

efilife 4mo ago
Because it's AI slop. It's the same tone every time

cortesoft 4mo ago

Maybe it's just because I am old, or have worked on internet software for almost 30 years, but none of this seems surprising or even concerning? Someone sets up a server that accepts connections to it and then someone sends a connection request to it. There has been no agreement on anything, no expectations or rules established. No one forces the server to accept any connection request it gets, and no one forces someone to make a connection request to that server. What the server returns and what the client does with that are completely up to each side. I feel like this agreement (or lack thereof?) works both ways. I don't think users should get mad if a website decides to use information about your connection request in anyway it chooses, but I also don't think a website should be able to get mad if I do whatever I want with the data it sends to me. In other words, websites can choose to remember whatever they want about my IP address and my request details, and I can choose to do whatever I want with what they send back to me (i.e. I can block ads or refuse to make followup requests that the site tells me to make, and i can choose to display the response in whatever way i want to) I asked for data, they sent me data. If I don't want them knowing stuff about me, I shouldn't send that stuff in my request. If they don't want me to have that data unless I also display ads, then they should make me agree to that before sending me the data. Of course, I know in practice most people don't understand what their browsers are doing, and there aren't a ton of practical choices for people around what their browser sends, and the internet is no longer an optional thing for a lot of our lives. I also know that things like DDOS attacks and the like make a completely 'anything goes' setup impractical. However, I still have this gut feeling that we shouldn't expect too much from either side when we make an internet request.

scotty79 4mo ago
Browser volunteering an angle at which I'm holding my phone is a bit surprising.
- Matheus28 4mo ago
  Why? Some web apps might want to present a different interface if you’re in landscape.

everdrive 4mo ago

"With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops." This is surely only partially true.

quietsegfault 4mo ago

Jokes on them, they got the wrong IP address, dummies!!! My IP address is 127.0.0.1!

notatoad 4mo ago

the breathless fearmongering but also condescending tone of this really makes it hard to take seriously. yeah, you can "digitally fingerprint" me when i browse the web. do you know when else you can get my fingerprints? literally any time i touch something in the real world, i leave my fingerprints behind. and nobody is making websites telling us all what a risk to privacy that is. if you want to make me afraid of browser fingerprinting, try explaining how that information can be used to harm me. i'm aware that it's possible, i just don't care because it doesn't seem like it's that big of a deal.

Swizec 4mo ago

I love that the very first thing it showed was wrong > San Pablo, California, United States > You appear to be in San Pablo, United States. Your internet provider is AT&T Enterprises, LLC. We know this because your IP address — 108.xxx.xxx.233 — was the first thing your device sent us I am in San Francisco. IPs are not a reliable location identifier and never have been. Especially on mobile. Thank you for coming to my ted talk

mmh0000 4mo ago

Wow! Somebody with ChatGPT discovered the concept of browser headers, then for some odd reason made the verbiage really ... weird "We chose not to tell you"... okay... Anyway, if you really want to know what your browser is sending: https://browserleaks.com/ https://browserleaks.com/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

kykat 4mo ago

Visiting without JS: "With JavaScript off, the page cannot tell you what your browser disclosed. The data is still there. The disclosure still happened. Only the telling of it stops." I find this hyper dramatic LLM language extremely off putting, but appreciate the signal that allows me to completely disregard it.

mcintyre1994 4mo ago

> Your device carries these typefaces, of the seventeen commonly probed by fingerprinting checks. The specific combination of fonts on your device is nearly unique Is this actually true? Because I don’t even know if I have any control over this on iOS, and if I do then I’d guess almost nobody diverges from the default?

mwheelz 4mo ago
Fair point, and you're right. On iOS the stock font set is essentially uniform across devices in the same OS version, so the "nearly unique" claim doesn't hold there. Just pushed a hedge: prose now distinguishes between desktop (where fonts accumulate via apps and OS over time, and the bundle is genuinely identifying) and iOS/Android (where it isn't, on its own). Combined with screen + GPU + language + timezone the iOS version still narrows the field, but the prose shouldn't overclaim. Thanks.

sitzkrieg 4mo ago

dark gray on black text was a terrible choice, virtually unreadable contrast

efilife 4mo ago
It's Claude that chose this and it doesn't really have eyes, so that's the reason
- sitzkrieg 4mo ago
  what a terrible reason lol. i should mention i use light mode and it got that wrong to boot

xinan 4mo ago

I wish it knows that I absolutely hate dark modes with such low contrast.

devmor 4mo ago

Wow! A significant amount of that information is wrong. I guess my corporate security is doing their job pretty well.

every 4mo ago

It seems to have a little trouble with lynx... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

binyu 4mo ago

They forgot to add timing attack on images load time which can be used to tell if you visited X website. https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2011/PAPERS/2011/paper010.pdf https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2011/PAPERS/2011/paper010...

lights0123 4mo ago
Not since browsers started partitioning caches in 2020: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning/ https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning/
- binyu 4mo ago
  I don't think this protects from sidechannel/timing attacks applied to images load time completely. Edit: Reading more thoroughly, probably it does to a great extent after all.

bunbun69 4mo ago

Ok… Are we supposed to care?

seydor 4mo ago

I thought the referer was not available under https anymore

mwheelz 4mo ago
[dead]

relevant_stats 4mo ago

The stats are wrong - on Android my finger has not moved triple digit times, and I haven't tapped double digit times. In 4 seconds. My general location is also wrong. This site's theme is barely visible. And the entire idea for the site is at least couple decades old. Unoriginal slop.

looneysquash 4mo ago

Would be nice if more people were focus on fixing these issues instead of just a bunch of "we already know", and making fun up the tone of the site. Thanks op for reminding us of the privacy issues with our browsers. The EFF and others already told us, but the issues remain. Lets hope you're hear to stay and fight for our privacy alongside us.

mwheelz 4mo ago
Thanks for that. The page isn't trying to tell anyone something they don't already know, it's trying to put it in front of the people who haven't been told. The bug reports today have been gold and the volume is meaningfully better for them.

ShabbyDoo 4mo ago

Access to the available font list might be useful for identifying devices likely issued by a particular organization. Unusual fonts that are part of an org's branding usually are installed as part of a standard device image. This allows employees to produce brand-compliant presentations, etc. I was an intern at GE in the mid-90's and we had a custom font with just one character defined - the "meatball" corporate logo.

mwheelz 4mo ago

[flagged]

nyumat 4mo ago

Another vibe-sloped false-integrity derivative. Cmon, OP..

flint 4mo ago

Something attacked my computer. I shut the page, and some old one popped up. I shut it, and they popped up again I shut my browser, and Notepad++ was filling with <cr><lf> I closed Notepad++, closed every open app, and restarted.

simonw 4mo ago

Cute detail: if you switch to another tab and then back again it shows a banner at the top: > You left for 6.3 seconds. We noticed.

YeGoblynQueenne 4mo ago

Huh? The user mwheelz seems to have been [dead]'d in the time this post has been on the front page. If I look at their comments page, those posted more than 46 minutes ago (at the time of writing) are normally visible and the rest are [dead]. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mwheelz https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mwheelz Mods, is there something we should know? Is there maybe a reason to stay away from the linked website?

CyberDildonics 4mo ago
Huhh?? Oh dear, ok but it's because they ai generated everything to make a poor copy of other websites.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

kbigdelysh 4mo ago

So if they can figure out whether I have an expensive laptop/computer based on my graphic card, then they can adjust the prices I see on the page (e.g.higher prices for game devs/players and lower prices for plumbers). Not fair.

barbs 4mo ago

"Your screen is 320 by 568 pixels, rendered at 2x density — which means it is almost certainly a recent, high-end display." Not quite, I'm on a 2016 iPhone SE

yard2010 4mo ago

Tell me what kind of smell my last fart had. Now this will be scary.

arkensaw 4mo ago

> You have been on this page for 92 seconds. You scrolled 0% of the way down. You never left this tab. Uhm... how did I get to the bottom if I scrolled 0%?

tristor 4mo ago

None of the information identified for me was surprising using an up-to-date Firefox on Mac w/ a mostly default configuration. I had to unblock Javascript in NoScript for the page to work. I get the point, but I think the EFF Panopticon page is a better representation of browser fingerprinting and how it works, because most of the things shared are really basic elements of data that aren't personally identifiable. You can absolutely fingerprint Firefox with a default config, so obviously this was vibe-coded and just doesn't do much. Cool, you did a GeoIP lookup, read the user-agent, the referrer header, and the accessibility data, exactly zero of that should be surprising to anyone that knows how you access a website.

shepherdjerred 4mo ago

How did you prompt Claude to be so paranoid but also bad at fingerprinting? Of course the browser knows my IP and language. Nothing on this page is really surprising

cyanydeez 4mo ago

hrm. We need a modified browser that just randomly switches the finger prints for linkndin.

D2OQZG8l5BI1S06 4mo ago

AI really has a problem picking proper fonts, this is barely readable...

byhemechi 4mo ago

Unreadable and useless vibe coded shit. Submissions like this are why I've all but stopped using HN

LPisGood 4mo ago
I didn’t find it unreadable. It was pretty neat in my opinion.
- byhemechi 4mo ago
  45% grey text on a 10% grey background set in a light serif font.

MrDresden 4mo ago

Yet even with all this information most webpages still insist on showing me the language version of the country who's IP address I have rather than, you know, using the preferred language selection. It's almost like web devs don't know the concept of traveling outside ones county.

doondoob 4mo ago

The biggest annoying thing was the clearly AI written doom-voice. Why did this make the front page?

y42 4mo ago

Shameless plug: It's not that fancy but follows the same principle: https://institut-fdh.de/?2026-aya https://institut-fdh.de/?2026-aya There's also this well known page which does the exact same thing in a more ordered way: https://browserleaks.com/ https://browserleaks.com/

ritwik310 4mo ago

[dead]

cadamsdotcom 4mo ago

Whoever made this page, you need to rip out the fade in animation. I lasted 4 seconds on your page.