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Privacy Possum makes tracking you less profitable
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Study on the effectiveness of fingerprinting countermeasures #79

Closed lordraiden closed 6 years ago

lordraiden commented 6 years ago

Please consider this

The research paper FP-Scanner: The Privacy Implications of Browser Fingerprint Inconsistencies by Antoine Vastel, Pierre Laperdrix, Walter Rudametkin, and Romain Rouvoy, reveals that anti-fingerprinting techniques may not be as effective as developers claim they are.

https://www.ghacks.net/2018/07/04/study-on-the-effectiveness-of-fingerprinting-countermeasures/ https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01820197

cowlicks commented 6 years ago

Hello @lordraiden thank you for the reference. I skimmed the paper, here is my understanding:

They tested a group of anti-fingerprinting tools, which unfortunately did not include privacy possum. These were tested these against: fingerprintjs2, augur.io, and their own novel fingerprinter "FP-Scanner"

FP-Scanner did better than fingerprintjs2 and augur.io. But FP-Scanner is not commercially available, at least not yet.

The fingerprinting measures that Privacy Possum takes have previously been shown to work effectively against both fingerprintjs2, and augur.io (however I cannot find a recent working install of augur.io to test with again).

If FP-Scanner, or some new technique it has becomes commercially available, I will work to make Privacy Possum block it. Until then, I don't think there is anything to do about it.