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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Right, I understand.

    There are browsers that implement a lot of Tor Browser’s anti-fingerprinting features, such as LibreWolf.

    The problem is that if you’re connecting to a site from an unique IP address then you’re still uniquely identifiable regardless of how much your browser resists fingerprinting measures. If you have a dynamic IP address, information can still be derived from this to build an approximate profile for you (location, language, possible interests, statistically likely demographic bands etc.). It’s surprising how accurate these can get.

    The strength of the anti-fingerprinting features in Tor browser is really an additional protection on top of the main anonymisation feature: the routing. Everyone using the Tor browser and routing appears (kind of) the same to a site.

    Connecting through a VPN provider is a half-way measure, but still won’t be as good as Tor. To a site or tracker you’ll appear as one of a smaller set of people connecting from that VPN where your browser fingerprint is different from others in the pool of people connecting via that VPN. That may not be enough to personally identify you, but it’s enough to build a fairly well-targeted profile of you.

    So tl;dr: anti-fingerprinting browser features are really cool and technically clever, but they don’t protect against all the ways you can be profiled. And somewhat counter-intuitively, using only browser-level de-anonymisation features could actually make you appear more unique to sites or trackers, because you’ll be one of relatively few people with that combination of browser and network connection profile.