Hello!

Ever since I’ve seen the screenshot of permissions that the Threads app requires, I’ve been thinking that it would be a great idea if you could have an app that would give them the permission, but kept feeding it random and bullshit data.

This could extend to other fingerprinting tools on the web - I can make my browser have limited fingerprinting, but as far as I know, it’s usually static. Using letterboxing will set your pixel size to a common value, and privacy focused browsers are using constant User Agent that includes everything.

But that’s not going to help too much - I want my fingerprint to be random, and totally wrong. Feed them unusable data, something that not only isn’t useful for them - but also actively sabotages their analytics. Pair that with a VPN, and now they have no way how to track you across sites, and also get a lot of bullshit data.

Another great thing would be an Adblock extension that not only hides every ad, but also click on it. Multiple times. Sure, it would be giving money to the websites you visit (which may be good), but it will also cost advertisers who pay for clicks (and will probably get you banned anyway).

I’m assuming that nothing like that exists, but I suppose that forking UBlock or forking LibreWolf could work, and just adding a Random here and there into their anti-fingerprinting code could maybe not be so hard.

    • Mikina@programming.devOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Ooh, nice! This is exactly what I was looking for.

      Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work with Librewolf, which I guess has hardcoded some tracking options - even after I disabled Enhanced Tracking Protections, I’m still at 0 clicked adds even though I tried really hard to visit ad infested sites :D Oh well, I’ll see if I can do something about it, because this is a concept I really support.

      EDIT: Ok, I was just really bad at finding sites with ads, for some reason :D

  • Mikina@programming.devOPEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Another thing that came to my mind is - I wouldn’t mind running a few bots that do this, exploiting the analytics of a company by just running in the background and skewing their statistics. So, if a bot like that exists, I’m all for that. Even if it would mean running selenium all day.

  • Anolutheos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    I wonder if this could end up being counterintuitive? A random / BS fingerprint likely looks a lot different than most real fingerprints, so it might end up making you stand out even more.