• bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    12 days ago

    Generally browser fingerprinting is used to identify individual browser sessions across IP addresses. This mostly takes into account reported features and capabilities of the browser and OS to the website. Fingerprinting isn’t looking for specific info your browser reports, it’s taking it all and hashing it to get a unique id specific to the browser. Because it’s hashed, it can’t be reversed to identify the OS from the hash.

    Sure a malicious website could Ignore the user agent and probe for some hardware capabilities that are specific to Linux, but that would be a lot of effort to probe various things which are set differently across all different browsers. I can’t speak for bad actors, but I wouldn’t spend the effort to check if the user agent is spoofed, if 95% of the time it’s accurate to get the OS type.