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Comment by hpaavola | Hacker News Reader

Firefox has "privacy.resistFingerprinting" setting which eliminated many fingerprinting mechanisms (at least time zone, resolution, canvas, webgl, maybe others). Anyone know what major sites it breaks or what other drawbacks there are setting it True? It defaults to False.

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I just enabled it to try how it changes the results. Many data points vanished, but suddenly the screen size doesn't show my actual screen size (1920x1080, not very unique) but the size of my viewport (very unique, considering I have a sidebar active). Can somebody confirm this? Why would this setting affect this?

I made the same observation. I also have a sidebar, and after enabling resistFingerprinting, the screen size is a unique identifier for me.

Edit: Here [1] is a relevant link from the mozilla support forum. It links to an old bug report in Tor, and they claim that this actually reveals less information about you. Imo it still makes tracking easier, but I didn't really dig into it.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1200851#answer-1...

Doesn't it mean that each time you resize your browser you get a different fingerprint? Sounds good to me. You just shouldn't make it full screen.

As a sibling stated, the immediately noticeable effect is most, if not all, websites showing timestamps in utc0.

I don't want to make such a strong statement as to wholly blame it on the fingerprint resistance setting, but within a week of turning it on, my Google account that I use for my Android devices had all payments suspended.

As in, I could not buy anything from Google nor use their Pay service (not that I otherwise use it for everyday purchases).

Until I gave them a photo of my ID.

I finally reinstated my account last week after this happened over a half-year ago.

I originally saw it as a fun experiment to see how long I could go without needing to buy anything in the spirit of deGoogling, but I decided at this point, just in case, that I'd rather not find myself in some sort of preventable, inconvenient tough-spot somewhere down the line (largely out of an uncertain sense of physical safety).

> Until I gave them a photo of my ID.

That's fucking nuts. Why did you even accept such a thing? Why is it ok for a private company to ask for your ID and keep a copy indefinitely?

When you want them to provide financial services

or if you want to look at some pornography - at least that seems to be the way the UK is heading...

Google does financial services???? Why would you accept that? Don't you have a bank already? Sorry i'm trying not to judge but i seriously don't understand why we would give google even MORE power over our lives than they already have (too much).

For most people the convenience of Google Pay outweighs the risk that they won't be able to buy coffee with it one morning if their account gets suspended or that they'll be targeted coffee bean ads instead of other ads.

Unfortunately, privacy.resistFingerprinting intentionally breaks the prefers-color-scheme CSS media query, telling all websites that you want a light color scheme. It would be nice if they could at least have made it so that it doesn't indicate any preference.

Maybe try the DarkReader plugin (for FF - not sure if there is an equivalent for other browsers)? I use it since hardly any sites that I visit have a dark theme available.

I had to reset it to False due to one annoying consequence: Since the time zone is set to UTC, all my workmates on Slack assumed I'm working from another country. And I had to mentally calculate time differences. It was the only major issue but was too much of a hassle.

it breaks pasting on facebook

Pasting what? I have this set and tried pasting various things on FB and everything worked as expected. The only downside I've noticed after roughly 12 hours is that zoom (ctrl+ in FF) is reset which makes text barely readable on high-dpi screens.

Maybe you have some other add-ons interfering?

on another try, you might be right.

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