this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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I've just been playing around with https://browserleaks.com/fonts . It seems no web browser provides adequate protection for this method of fingerprinting -- in both brave and librewolf the tool detects rather unique fonts that I have installed on my system, such as "IBM Plex" and "UD Digi Kyokasho" -- almost certainly a unique fingerprint. Tor browser does slightly better as it does not divulge these "weird" fonts. However, it still reveals that the google Noto fonts are installed, which is by far not universal -- on a different machine, where no Noto fonts are installed, the tool does not report them.

For extra context: I've tested under Linux with native tor browser and flatpak'd Brave and Librewolf.

What can we do to protect ourselves from this method of fingerprinting? And why are all of these privacy-focused browsers vulnerable to it? Is work being done to mitigate this?

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[–] sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Tor has noscript automatically enabled no?

[–] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

It should, but I guess this user disabled it. I visited the same site with javascript disabled and it can't fingerprint it (not in tor browser, I don't trust it (css has nasty fingerprinting capabilities, huge mozilla codebase), I use w3m with torsocks and my useragent set to tor browsers, also tested qutebrowser with js disabled).

[–] foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

stated in post, w3m, a text browser (unless it wasn't there when I last edited it, I'm a very sporadic editor)

[–] sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Never heard of w3m, will check it out

Edit: I thought I was paranoid for using tor as a daily browser lmao

[–] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 months ago

Tor has noscript automatically enabled no?

There's three security settings via NoScript in Tor browser. The default has JS enabled.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago

It does, but you have to manually configure it to turn off javascript entirely.