Google now allows digital fingerprinting of its users
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/google-now-allows-digital-fingerprinting-of-its-usersOpen linkView original on sh.itjust.works185
Comments41https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/google-now-allows-digital-fingerprinting-of-its-usersOpen linkView original on sh.itjust.works
Me loving GrapheneOS intensifies.
Chromium and Webview ripped out and replaced with hardened Vanadium.
Man, I had gaming scheduled for this weekend. I guess I gotta move up my plan to backup everything and switch over to GrapheneOS.
If you have a Pixel, yes.
If you have a Galaxy, you're in for some s**t
It's possible, but a huge PITA. Learning how to do it, that is. Once you know all the magic incantations and have your potions and elixirs available, it's easy enough.
Most of the "how to" guides don't mention all the little crap you need to know so it takes a lot of trolling through forums to find why this next step isn't working.
How does GrapheneOS play with folding phones? Nicely?
Probably as well as any other stock Android ROM, because that's all it is, plus a few security patches on top.
I have a galaxy phone but haven't pursued the idea of installing grapheneOS on it as I thought it would be impossible. Please share you arcane knowledge of the unholy incarnations.
I'm still waffling between CachyOS and Bazzite. 😆
I've been daily driving bazzite for a few months, I would highly recommend you give it a distro hop for a bit to see if it fits you. The main downside is getting used to the atomic mindset and changing how you install your tooling
I actually have it on a laptop, because I wanted something virtually bulletproof that my SO could have that just works. No worrying about broken configs or leftover cruft.
Just undecided if I want it on my main desktop. I've had a few minor but annoying issues with it, though nothing unworkable. Ricing is sometimes problematic, and that's something I enjoy. I really like the build process, though, and how you can downstream your own version, and I like
ostreebackups (plus I can't wait forbootc).gimme a decent rom guaranteed to work with my six-year-old unsupported hardware
Maybe /e/OS?
Last I recall, Vanadium lags behind customized-Firefox in privacy features, and even more behind the Tor Browser.
Having a tool like Noscript is absolutely necessary, with today's browsers, if you want to fight fingerprinting.
All I known is DivestOS is dead as is Mull 😮.
And there's things Vanadium/web view offer that Android Firefox never can:
By default Vanadium's JIT JavaScript is blocked. Can easily turn off regular JavaScript if ya want on site settings.
The Madaidans article lacks relevance, we are talking about fingerprinting.
That's just not true, many of those are things that Android Firefox likely won't do, but that doesn't mean they can't do it.
That said, I care more about privacy than theoretical attacks. Companies are tracking me, black hats might attack me.
What service provider are you using with Graphene? I want to de google but it seems a wasted effort when I have FI
I'm able to use Organic Maps with RH Voice with the sandboxed Google Play + Android Auto Graphene uses for my travelling/cycling/Public-transit map needs.
Mint Mobile. I'm fine with 5GB/5G:$15/month ~$185/year. 🤘😁.
I download flac songs/albums for off line use with Tidal when not streaming on WiFi.
PipePipe for YouTube/etc stuffs.
720por background playback to save bandwith/battery isn't bad.Thunderbird for my gmail account.
But in process of moving to Tuta.
According to multiple users on the GrapheneOS forum it works just fine https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/7950-does-grapheneos-work-with-google-fi/2
Yeah I'm going with a Murena phone and /e/os installed, as they're both European.
I unfortunately can't really see how a browser could still be nice to use and properly resist fingerprinting.
The site https://amiunique.org/fingerprint tries to fingerprint your browser and lists the used attributes along with their uniqueness within their dataset. And while a browser could pretty reliably lie about its User Agent or Platform, it's often just necessary for a modern website to know, for example, what your view-port's resolution is or what kind of audio/video codecs your device supports. Going through my own results, I'd say combining these necessary data points is probably enough to identify me, even though I'm pretty privacy-conscious.
Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I think preventing fingerprinting would need a regulatory instead of a technical solution. Unfortunately that doesn't seem very likely anytime soon.
The EFF has had a couple of websites that would profile you on exactly this data, so you're completely correct in that even the basic normal required metadata is more than enough to identify you pretty well.
coveryourtracks.eff.org is where it's living now, and a quick glance shows that just using browser capabilities and such is absolutely enough to identify me.
For the lazy: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
Thats very good thank you
This helps so much more on mobile using an app. Thank you for your service!
Browser?
Lol they own Android...it's the entire os. They're fingerprinting every android phone.
No, AOSP is FOSS. They dont own it. By default it doesn't install any google blobs.
Always reinstall your OS when you buy a new device.
Happy cake day!
There are extentions for Firefox that randomise most of that. They add random supported codecs for example, enough to make it believable, not enough to make it a unique combination.
It's not perfect, nothing is, but it seems to be good enough.
I've been using browsers for a couple of decades without digital fingerprinting and it's nice enough for me. I see no need to make it nicer.
Such as?
Every browser can be fingerprinted, even Tor browser, which goes out of its way to resist fingerprinting. The only way to really avoid fingerprinting is to not use JavaScript, which is extremely limiting.
Perhaps this will motivate makers of web browsers to finally get serious about making fingerprinting less easy. Looking at you, Mozilla.
Mozilla already has anti fingerprint settings.
Yes, but with a few caveats. Last time I used the 'Resist Fingerprinting' option, it made window resizing funky and some sites flat out rendered wrong.
It needs some polish and some user controls.
That's the tradeoff you have to make. Your window size is a good fingerprint, so spoofing the size makes sense. But websites that need to window size for legitimate reasons are breaking.
How else could it be? The window size directly identifies you AND determines the page layout.
You mean it didn't already?
Getting away from Google isn't easy, but it's required.
I think its pretty easy. Did the transition like 10 years ago. Today its easy as pie.
I mean, do you not use YouTube? How do you search? Do you avoid anything built on googleapis?
After reading these reports of intensified fingerprinting I decided to block all scripts on my browser using uBlock. Can't do much regarding the IP tho