Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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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How does using browser extensions help browser fingerprinting? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 hours ago by Emberleaf@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Can someone help me understand this? If hundreds of thousands of people use a popular browser extension, how does that make it easier for you to be singled out among them? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this, can anyone help?

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[–] refalo@programming.dev 4 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

In the context of fingerprinting I disagree. The vast majority of the world population do NOT use an ad-blocker (supposedly maybe 15% do at most)... so having an adblocker can be used to narrow you down even more IMO. Many extensions can have this issue afaik, especially if it modifies the DOM.

[–] Emberleaf@lemmy.ml 4 points 6 hours ago

Actually as of 2024, 31.5% of internet users worldwide use an adblocker. Source: https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

[–] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

However, allowing ads means allowing tracking. You got corelation with the ads being served from ad brokers, who can now see what sites you been on and have a record of where you've been.

[–] refalo@programming.dev 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Yes but I think you still need a unique fingerprint in order to tie that data to a single person... and there are much less people who use ad-blockers than those who don't, so to me it's an extra bit of identifying information; obviously this puts the privacy-conscious user in a difficult position and I don't know that there's a perfect answer.