Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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[Question] Font fingerprinting -- even tor browser is vulnerable!? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by renzev@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] climateserver8538@infosec.pub 2 points 4 months ago

Not sure whether it can fix the font problem, but in general Flatseal allows you to customise permissions for installed flatpaks.

https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.tchx84.Flatseal