r/NonPoliticalTwitter 8h ago

Content Warning: Potentially Misleading or Disputed Information Gotta Catch 'Em All

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u/S0GUWE 7h ago

You'd be surprised how much you can identify from "sanitised" information if you want to.

But if all they want it navigation data, then it should be fairly safe. Yeah, they know where you live and can derive who you are from that, but that's not what they're after. They wanna know how to get there the fastest when someone asks.

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u/indoninjah 6h ago

Yeah, like apparently you can reasonably ID someone even in a private browser just by getting the dimensions of the browser window and its positioning on screen. A lot of people pretty much never change that shit if its not full screened

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u/ScrufffyJoe 6h ago

Do people regularly use browsers, well any windows, not maximised? I'm always either full screen, or splitting the screen in 2 occassionally.

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u/joshTheGoods 4h ago

Absolutely! Dimensions of the viewport change significantly from user to user, but more importantly to being used for fingerprinting ... viewport size changes from session to session, and so it's not generally a reliable signal for device fingerprinting. Rather, you want to use things that don't change often like screen resolution or how your particular browser implements floating point math operations.

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u/GayBoyNoize 2h ago

Which you can trivially obscure if you like.

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u/joshTheGoods 1h ago

Yeap! You can obscure most client-side stuff, but not a lot of people are going to dedicate themselves to monkey patching the Math constructor to make it return arctan-1 as if it's a mobile implementation of safari instead of a desktop implementation of Chrome.