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Protecting Against Browser-Language Fingerprinting:
Brave has further strengthened its fingerprinting protections by preventing users from being identified based on preferred browser language. Starting with version 1.39, Brave randomizes how your browser informs sites of what language(s) you've set as default, and what fonts you have installed on your system. This expands Brave's existing fingerprinting protections, already the strongest of any popular browser.
When you visit a website, your browser needs to tell that site your default language(s). This helps the site present content in a language you can understand. Browsers do this both explicitly (for example, with the Accept-Language header, and the navigator.language and navigator.languages Web APIs) and implicitly (for example with the fonts you have installed on your system).
However, as with so much online, features meant to improve your experience often just expose you to more risk. In this case, trackers can use your language preferences (both implicit and explicit) to fingerprint you, identifying you across sites and browsing sessions.
Brave's unique "farbling" features already provide the best fingerprinting protections of any popular browser. These add small amounts of randomization into identifying browser features—enough to confuse and defeat trackers, but not so much that they break sites. With this latest release, Brave has expanded "farbling" protections to language preferences, too.
[...] With these new protections against browser-language fingerprinting, Brave now reduces and randomizes the information available in these APIs. And we've incorporated these as default protections, via Brave Shields.
By default, Brave will only report your most preferred language. So, if your language preferences are "English (United States)" first, and Korean second, the browser will only report "en-US,en."1 Brave will also randomize the reported weight (i.e., "q") within a certain range.
Currently Brave applies font fingerprinting protections on Android, macOS, and Windows versions. Brave does not apply these protections to iOS versions for two reasons: platform restrictions prevent us from doing so; and WKWebView already includes similar, although not quite as strong, protections3. Brave does not apply these protections on Linux because of difficulties in determining which fonts are "OS fonts" for each distro.
Total Cookie Protection
Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection
Starting today, Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection by default to all Firefox users worldwide [...]. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox's strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.
[...] Total Cookie Protection works by creating a separate "cookie jar" for each website you visit. Instead of allowing trackers to link up your behavior on multiple sites, they just get to see behavior on individual sites. Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to only that website. No other websites can reach into the cookie jars that don't belong to them and find out what the other websites' cookies know about you [...].
I wonder if "farbling" and "Total Cookie Protection" will also become identifying features...?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 17 2022, @02:59PM (4 children)
After a separate cookie jar, to get rid of fingerprinting, how about:
Publish a few standard sets of features are are implementable on a variety of platforms.
A user can choose a specifc set to tell the web page he has.
Then everybody's fingerprint is one of the few standard sets.
Perhaps that means the browser can't use every last feature available at the user's computer, but good enoguh beats what we have now.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 17 2022, @05:12PM (3 children)
You forget one thing: the people that are gatekeepers on these browsers are the same people who want to be able to fingerprint you.
And be careful about unintended consequences as well; I'll refer to the GDPR Cookie Consent banner. People are lazy and will click the "make this question go away, which button does that in the quickest way possible" in nanoseconds.
For those who do take the time to click the wise button instead of the lazy button, there will be messages of "this website doesn't work if you don't let us rape you" which will carve off another 75% of people who will now just click the "OK, fine, even though you're not lubed up" button.
My prediction is that you'll end up with something that's _not_ good enough and probably worse than what we have right now.
The solution is to outlaw targeted advertising and impose actual hurting(*) fines on violators-of-the-spirit thereof. _That_ is the real solution!
(*): Forfeiting of any and all direct and indirect revenue generated via the outlawed behavior plus a fine of XX% of revenue of the company. Toss in personal liability for those who signed off on the practice for good measure. I don't care that this might kill a company, companies do not have a presumed right to existence, nor to their business model. Maybe a couple of examples would be a good thing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2022, @12:18AM (2 children)
GDPR implementation has been clarified recently. Now it's correctly implemented almost everywhere with the same number of clicks (often one) to accept all or reject all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2022, @12:05PM (1 child)
And how many years did that take?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday June 19 2022, @07:33AM
True, it would have been nice to have this years ago - but the point is that we DO now have it. Progress might be slow, but this story and the one here about net neutrality in Europe [soylentnews.org]show that change is taking place to protect internet users rather than the businesses that wish to control it.