The 100% charging readout is the desktop-with-no-battery phantom. I pushed a stricter filter for that earlier, you may be on a cached copy (try a hard refresh). On the light-mode call: the page detects your preference but doesn't honor it, intentionally. The irony being that the demo ignores the same signal it points out. I take the cost of the annoyance.
> It would probably still be low contrast garbage even if it did. :/
My guess this is LLM slop website generation. And they forgot to prompt to include high contrast text... And the site owner cant make the changes without a sloperator.
Same, it said Riverside but I'm in San Diego (about 100 miles away from Riverside).
Of course, its just using a geolocation database for the IP address and thus reporting the location of some switching center Verizon runs and not my actual location.
If you're trying to prove a point about privacy its probably best not to lead off with information that can be off by hundreds of miles while presenting the fact that it "knows" this information as being darkly ominous.
Presenting this information while being wrong probably does the opposite of the site's intent and gives some people a false sense of security because what real websites and apps track about you using digital fingerprinting is a lot more detailed, personalized and (usually) correct than what this website presents.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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.
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
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.
> 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).
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).
> 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).
Tor and similar multi-hop proxies, depending on construction, supposedly can't match source to destination IPs.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
"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?
Real bug. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" for the renderer string and my parser was grabbing the second half. Fixed; pushing in a minute. Your GPU is fine. Your browser is doing the right thing.
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.
The GPU string really is the spicy one combined with screen + fonts it's enough to single you out across most of the open web. The card itself is a tank.
Yea that is a strong fingerprint. Especially if any of the other things were correct or someone has a way to model your behaviors. How long you scroll vs how often you type etc. and somehow that's still not enough for big tech and they need biometrics, photo IDs, etc.
Yeah, the bottom counter on the page is meant to make exactly that point. Mouse movements, scroll velocity, tab switches, reading pauses are all features in modern fraud / "trust" scoring systems alongside the static fingerprint. Biometrics is the next layer, and it's already happening on the back of "passive" liveness detection most people never see.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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...).
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.
Browsers are stuck between compatibility and privacy. Every bit of environment detail has some site that claims to need it, and every extra bit makes users easier to distinguish.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
People discovering "just how the web works" have spawned myriad complaints, misguided laws, and general anger and confusion. I wish there was a test people had to take before they go online or something. Otherwise they'll still be mad that Chrome Incognito didn't prevent ads.google.com from registering them as a pageview statistic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
* 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?
The amount of fingerprinting this page reveals pales in comparison to what actually happens in the wild
* That's the wrong battery percentage and the wrong charging status.
> Since you can detect light mode, would it kill you to honor it?
It would probably still be low contrast garbage even if it did. :/
The 100% charging readout is the desktop-with-no-battery phantom. I pushed a stricter filter for that earlier, you may be on a cached copy (try a hard refresh). On the light-mode call: the page detects your preference but doesn't honor it, intentionally. The irony being that the demo ignores the same signal it points out. I take the cost of the annoyance.
Okay but it's really hard to read for those of us with old people eyes.
> It would probably still be low contrast garbage even if it did. :/
My guess this is LLM slop website generation. And they forgot to prompt to include high contrast text... And the site owner cant make the changes without a sloperator.
> I'm not in that city.
Same, it said Riverside but I'm in San Diego (about 100 miles away from Riverside).
Of course, its just using a geolocation database for the IP address and thus reporting the location of some switching center Verizon runs and not my actual location.
If you're trying to prove a point about privacy its probably best not to lead off with information that can be off by hundreds of miles while presenting the fact that it "knows" this information as being darkly ominous.
Presenting this information while being wrong probably does the opposite of the site's intent and gives some people a false sense of security because what real websites and apps track about you using digital fingerprinting is a lot more detailed, personalized and (usually) correct than what this website presents.
It was much better for me.
* Your socks don't match anything in the room.
* The man you thought you killed in Tuscaloosa woke up and walked home an hour later and is now a chiropractor in Shreveport.
* Your daughter is pregnant by the kid who trims the hedges.
* Your dog is dreaming about the squirrel in the wood pile.
How does it know?
This is all common knowledge, unfortunately.
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/
> 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.
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.
If i run that (or similar sites) multiple times, shouldn't I like.. not be unique each time?
"It doesn't matter that the FUD isn't accurate" Hmm.
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.
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.
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.
It's the usual terse LLM voice that makes everything sound dramatic. Nails on a chalkboard
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.
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."
In short, another throwaway AI-generated slop project.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
does the same or better, without AI regurgitation and a WordPress theme.
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://amiunique.org/
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.
Brutally dark site doesn't seem to show much to my eyes. No modal appearing at the bottom.
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.
Another info leakage feedback tool:
https://www.ipleak.com/full-report/
A vibe-coded EFF Cover Your Tracks. The fact this made it to front-page is spookier than its contents
exactly, it even looks like a page created by someone asked to "replicate this, non-obviously, add fancy landing page theme".
Fugly.
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
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.
it got both my city and browser wrong i am not too concerned lol
> 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).
I think you are misreading this. It isn't saying they didn't ask ANYONE, they are saying they never asked YOU as a user for it.
Also, though, of COURSE your address arrived first... how else are they going to send back the data you are requesting?
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).
> 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).
Tor and similar multi-hop proxies, depending on construction, supposedly can't match source to destination IPs.
It has.. Shall we say tradeoffs.. In terms of latency mostly, but I suspect bandwidth is likely affected too
> 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.
My GPU identification is off by about a decade but it did get the brand right
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.
Same ID for mine. Are you running Firefox? Maybe that's a lie it tells to fingerprinters.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
I believe you only lose the referer header when switching between http and https.
good stuff but useful for non tech ppl. We already knew those things are exposed by the browser. probably worth putting in x/reddit
I appreciate the intent here, so this is constructive feedback:
"Your browser allocated 39322 MB of storage to this page alone"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.
Contrast is a violation of accessibility guidelines.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Hah I remember the picture of the scrotum.
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.
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)
"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?
Real bug. Firefox returns "Mozilla, or similar" for the renderer string and my parser was grabbing the second half. Fixed; pushing in a minute. Your GPU is fine. Your browser is doing the right thing.
I got "or similar" from Firefox and exact make and model from chrome. Probably a browser issue and not a hardware issue.
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.
not regretting choice of browser at all
The GPU string really is the spicy one combined with screen + fonts it's enough to single you out across most of the open web. The card itself is a tank.
Yea that is a strong fingerprint. Especially if any of the other things were correct or someone has a way to model your behaviors. How long you scroll vs how often you type etc. and somehow that's still not enough for big tech and they need biometrics, photo IDs, etc.
Yeah, the bottom counter on the page is meant to make exactly that point. Mouse movements, scroll velocity, tab switches, reading pauses are all features in modern fraud / "trust" scoring systems alongside the static fingerprint. Biometrics is the next layer, and it's already happening on the back of "passive" liveness detection most people never see.
It got mine quite wrong (Firefox).
The thing that bothered me is that browser are still sending the Referer info. I thought that was not supposed to work under https?
Yeah the exact kind shouldn't matter - just the WebGL capabilities.
you are using a Radeon RX 6900 XT on Fedora Linux. we know this because you admitted it in the previous comment.
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.
Heh, my battery (which I don't have cause this is a desktop) is at 100% apparently
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
The text legibility of the gray on black is a serious problem. My eyes aren't that bad but I can barely read this.
My eyes aren't great and I had to pinch-zoom to read parts of this page.
Aren't LLMs smart enough to choose better color contrast by now?
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.
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.
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?"
Text is so dim is really hard to read.
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-ch...
Perhaps this illustrates the ridiculous level to which website operators make assumptions about website visitors
This phenonemon is much older than "browser fingerprinting"
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.
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...).
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.
> 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.
Browsers are stuck between compatibility and privacy. Every bit of environment detail has some site that claims to need it, and every extra bit makes users easier to distinguish.
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.
Its pretty scary when you see it like this
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.
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.
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.
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.
How do we get our browser to stop sending all this information? It's really maddening.
I prefer https://fingerprint.com/demo
Terrible company-at least you know you are testing what is being used.
What's terrible about them?
They track us around the web.
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).
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.
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.
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.
You could have used show hn since you made it
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.
But why don't you show real tracking capabilities? Not what's accessible via the browser directly and legally :/
I'm not worried about my privacy. No one can read the dark text on that page anyhow.
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.
I can't help feeling that if you're turning JS off, you might as well turn off your computer to protect your data.
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
This site actually works just fine without JS.
Nah, HTTP logs still leak my circadian rhythm.
That's actually a fantastic idea!
Oh wait, no, I'm an e-addict. Drat! Curse this monkey!
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.
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.
People discovering "just how the web works" have spawned myriad complaints, misguided laws, and general anger and confusion. I wish there was a test people had to take before they go online or something. Otherwise they'll still be mad that Chrome Incognito didn't prevent ads.google.com from registering them as a pageview statistic.
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.
If the color scheme weren’t so atrocious, it would almost be possible to read what it says.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Yeah, no need JS to track resolution or even mouse movements with timing, pure HTML/CSS can do.
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.
It's relevant because connection-level fingerprinting is directly visible to intermediaries like cloudflare.
> 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.
Your browser discloses a lot more fingerprinting data than this
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?
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.
I can’t even read this on my phone, the text is too small and the contrast is terrible
Man what a awful looking site. I shouldn't have to crank my brightness to max to kind of read the words
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.
At least it doesn't know my age
Oh wait
Vibecoded slop with LLM-written copy. When will it stop
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.
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
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.
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.
We've seen tens of pages like this, all done better. Now the vibe coders got into it and completely fuck up the idea.
Lol, the description text is so dramatic.
>OH MY GOD WE KNOW STUFF ABOUT YOU
peoples obsession with 100% privacy while operating in a public space is immature. if you're that risk averse dont connect to the internet.