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?

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
    15·
    5 months ago

    It should, but I guess this user disabled it. I visited the same site with javascript disabled and it can’t fingerprint it (not in tor browser, I don’t trust it (css has nasty fingerprinting capabilities, huge mozilla codebase), I use w3m with torsocks and my useragent set to tor browsers, also tested qutebrowser with js disabled).

      • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
        4·
        5 months ago

        stated in post, w3m, a text browser (unless it wasn’t there when I last edited it, I’m a very sporadic editor)

        • ComradeSharkfuckerEnglish
          5·
          5 months ago

          Never heard of w3m, will check it out

          Edit: I thought I was paranoid for using tor as a daily browser lmao