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Apparition [soylentnews.org] writes:

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

The researchers investigated browser fingerprinting countermeasures to find out if these techniques would introduce inconsistencies and how these might impact user privacy.

The result is astonishing: not only is it possible to identify altered browser fingerprints, it is also sometimes possible to uncover the original values of fingerprint attributes that were altered by users.

The researchers developed FP-Scanner, a fingerprint scanner designed to explore "fingerprint attribute inconsistencies introduced by state-of-the-art countermeasures in order to detect if a given fingerprint is genuine or not".

The scanner detects a large number of attributes including HTTP headers, platform, fonts, screen resolution and more and checks them using various methods to find out whether they are genuine or fake.

[...] The developers provide analysis for user agent spoofers, random agent spoofer, canvas poiseners like Canvas Defender and Canvas FP Block, the Brave Browser, and other anti-fingerprinting techniques or implementations.

The researchers conclude that anti-fingerprinting techniques in browsers may make users more trackable rather than less because of the inconsistencies they introduce and use of these in the fingerprinting process.

[...] If you break the research down you will come to the conclusion that most anti-fingerprinting techniques are ineffective as it is possible to detect inconsistencies. While that would not be such a bad thing, the fact that these inconsistencies may be used to fingerprint users who value privacy is.

Original Submission