HN.zip

Open research, stronger privacy: Making Firefox users harder to fingerprint

94 points by - 17 comments
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think it's great that Firefox is finally doing more to combat fingerprinting. For a long time, they lagged a bit behind Brave in this regard. That said, unfortunately, neither browser has been able to do anything about Cloudflare Turnstile yet. Kagi, for example, uses it to fingerprint users.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I believe the relevant work to mitigate that is https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/06/pact-anonymous-credentials...

(I do work at Mozilla but not on any of this.)

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
There's a third option: allow bots and give them access as efficiently as possible.

As Reddit's API used to.

Don't want to? Tough, they'll do it the hard way and put more load on your servers and your countermeasures will drive away more humans than bots.

Of course our current bot plague doesn't understand this and seems to be optimizing for maximum server load, which is still bad.

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I'd like to have some of the APIs that read the data used to fingerprint browsers be behind a confirmation dialog per site similar to allowing popups or microphone/video access.

> Oh, I see that you'd like to read the canvas pixel data, let me check if that's okay with the user first.

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
HTML5 canvas data access has been behind such a permission dialog on Firefox (at least on desktop) for a long time now.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I'm on desktop Firefox v160.0 and I've never seen a permission dialog like that and under settings I see:

    Permissions
    Manage what websites can access, control, or trigger.
    
        Location
        Camera
        Device apps and services
        Local network devices
        Microphone
        Speaker
        Notifications
        Autoplay
        Virtual reality
None of those seem to be for accessing canvas data.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Too bad they still generate a random unique ID for each installed extension that can expose a trackable UUID...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1717671

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
One caveat I’ve experienced with Firefox branches that focus on privacy is I get “punished” with captchas from hell because I refuse to let websites siphon and prey on every last bit of private info. Hopefully this doesn’t succumb to the same issue.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Why do you want to use services that use such captchas? It’s like going to a club and complaining about the door policy. Don’t go if you don’t like it.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thanks for reminding me that Elon Musk got rejected from Berghain.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Am I the only expecting it to completely break the sites behind cloudflare on Firefox?
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Unless I'm misreading the post mentions that the most recent change was added to version 145 which released last year. Personally I haven't had any issues with cloudflare as a firefox user since then with strict mode enabled.

It links to this post when talking about it: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/fingerprinting-protectio...

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Was also thinking this, would like an answer.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Surveillance fingerprinting will only end with major changes to the web.

If you are among those capable of 3rd order thinking or even just 2nd order thinking, and consider what kind of world you want to live in, you may already know that these changes must happen, even if that means the functional web is bifurcated for a while.

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Are you talking about a return to a web of one-to-one connections, no broadcasts?

Actually the problem isn't broadcasts but reverse broadcasts. A broadcast sends one signal to all interested listeners - the problematic mode of the web is one listener getting all interested signals, which allows spam and propaganda (which are the same thing) to flood that set. Is there a word for this reverse broadcasting idea?

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Maybe you can use your second-order thinking to consider how people might react to a sentence that starts “if you are among those capable of 3rd order thinking.”
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Sorry to hear about your 3rd order thinking (or lack thereof, more specifically).