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submitted 9 months ago by Blaze@piefed.zip to c/privacy@programming.dev

Amidst the glossy marketing for VPN services, it can be tempting to believe that the moment you flick on the VPN connection you can browse the internet with full privacy. Unfortunately this is quite far from the truth, as interacting with internet services like websites leaves a significant fingerprint. In a study by [RTINGS.com] this browser fingerprinting was investigated in detail, showing just how easy it is to uniquely identify a visitor across the 83 laptops used in the study.

As summarized in the related video (also embedded below), the start of the study involved the Am I Unique? website which provides you with an overview of your browser fingerprint. With over 4.5 million fingerprints in their database as of writing, even using Edge on Windows 10 marks you as unique, which is telling.

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[-] DrDystopia@lemy.lol 24 points 9 months ago

Seems like a bit of an over-simplification. I'm using VPN to stop my ISP snooping and manipulating my web traffic. And being unique in this sense doesn't de-anonymize you.

[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

Yes! You are unique among the 4553814 fingerprints in our entire dataset.

Ah crap.....

[-] iii@mander.xyz 8 points 9 months ago

This is why tails even fixes browser window size. It's been a while since I looked at this landscape. Is tails still one of the best choices for, for example, whistleblowers?

[-] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 5 points 9 months ago

I ran the "Am I Unique?" thing, and it said yes and then showed my OS, Browser, Language and Time Zone, and 3/4 of them were wrong lol.

I'll take that as a good sign.

[-] RickyRigatoni@retrolemmy.com 2 points 9 months ago

Why does my browser tell javascript what plugins i have

[-] thermal_shock@lemmy.world -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I reserve a browser, like brave or edge, to use when I'm on the VPN. No plugins, no password manager, plain Jane vanilla browser + VPN, so they're "fingerprinting" something I don't use. Hard to compare when literally nothing matches.

Good luck.

Plus my VPN location changes often. Sometimes I use TOR browser on VPN (not sure it helps) if I'm wading through a very gray area.

Local pihole and ublock origin (on Firefox) alone seems to make my phone "unique" on its own.

this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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