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[–] 30 points 1 year ago (9 children)
  • Your operating system
  • Your CPU architecture

Agree. No reason they should have this.

  • Your JS interpreter's version and build ID

I can see a reasonable argument for this being allowed. Feature detection should make this unnecessary, but it doesn't seem to be fully supported yet.

  • Plugins & Extensions

This is clearly a break of the browser sandbox and should require explicit permission at the very least (if not be blocked outright...I'm curious what the legitimate uses for these would be).

  • Accelerometer and gyroscope & magnetic field sensor

Should probably be tied to location permission, for the sake of a simple UX.

  • Proximity sensor

Definitely potential legitimate reasons for this, but it shouldn't be by default.

  • Keyboard layout

As someone who uses a non-QWERTY (and non-QWERTY-based) layout, this is one I have quite a stake in. The bottom line is that even without directly being able to obtain this, a site can very easily indirectly obtain it anyway, thanks to the difference between event.code and event.key. And that difference is important, because there are some cases where it's better to use one or the other. A browser-based game, for example, probably wants to use event.code so the user can move around based on where WASD would be on a QWERTY keyboard, even though as a Dvorak user, for me that would be <AOE. But keyboard shortcuts like J and K for "next"/"previous" item should usually use event.key.

There could/should be a browser setting somewhere, or an extension, that can hide this from sites. But it is far too useful, relative to its fingerprinting value, to restrict for ordinary users.

how sensors are used to fingerprint you, I think it has to do with manufacturing imperfections that skew their readings in unique ways

It's also simple presence detection. "You have a proximity sensor" is a result not every browser will have, so it helps narrow down a specific browser.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    Operating system and CPU architecture are useful for sites to serve the correct binaries when a user is downloading an application. I know you could just give them all the options, but the average idiot has no idea what the difference between ARM and x86 is, or whether they have a 64 bit system. Hell, I wouldn’t even trust some users to accurately tell me what operating system they’re using.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    This was the only one I could think of a good reason to track. I immediately thought of all the grandparents and tech illiterate people who'd probably implode if they had to pick .exe vs .deb vs .dmg/.app (I actually had to look up what MacOS uses...) vs etc. And don't even try to have them guess intel vs amd.

    Automatically guessing the operating system saves us tech people from having to figure out they downloaded a file for a completely different OS.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Operating system and CPU architecture are useful for sites to serve the correct binaries when a user is downloading an application.

    Barely. You could trim down the data to incredibly low granularity ("OS: Windows", "CPU: Intel Desktop") and you'd still get the exact same binary as 99% of the people 99% of the time, anyway.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Oh yes, that's a very good point, actually. That actually seems such a fundamental use case that you could almost justify it being available without a permission.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    No. It should be made available with a permission, because not every site out there is going to offer you to download binaries. 1% of the web """requiring""" this does not justify 99% of the web being able to violate that privacy.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Reread the comment you replied to. Not one word of it was in there accidentally.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Good catch. Still, doesn't make it true either: it's not such a "fundamental use case" that it would even require the capability. The browser already reports the usable information in the user agent (you rarely even in that 1% need more specificity than "Windows" on "Desktop Intel").

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Plugins and extensions could make sense if the site and plugin are designed to talk to each other. But that could be made safer by each extension being able to decide whether to announce itself (and the user being able to override that).

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