It is offensive that browsers give away so much unnecessary info. What is necessary? Language preference, Javascript (yes/no), screen resolution. Optionally, latest supported html/css versions. That it, nothing else.

I understand Google having Chrome send way more info. Why do all other browsers go along with this?

Make it make sense...

Why can't a government simply ban all advertising and instead provide a good enough yellow pages service that just provides the specs of the product in a templated way?

Why would it be a good idea to expose unsuspecting citizens to false claims by the sellers?

Huh, it is different for me on every page refresh. No VPN, etc... just Firefox on Windows with uBlock, CanvasBlocker, and a PiHole. No persistent fingerprint for me!

I wonder if a browser extension could be made that inspects your fingerprint and informs you if you're too unique, then one-click to 'correct' those unique items (or at least list them), so you can conveniently go back to being ~anonymous if preferred.

If you use Firefox, do the following: Use the extension Chameleon (set it to rotate Random profile every minute), had strict mode with JShelter extension.

This royfish blog example, or anyother, including that fingerprint.com gets new value everytime.

Fingerprint.com charges around $0.004 per investigation, and really encourages you to set up a first party proxy - so iOS doesn't nuke storage after 7 days. And even there, unless its a cookie match; your ID usually carries a confidence number.

That should give some hint about how difficult it is to do in real life, at scale.

This site gave me the name “Greedy Bison”, but it didn’t say how many other “Greedy Bison” are out there. I’m guessing everyone using the very common device I’m using and using the very common browser that I’m using would get the same name as me

Lets hope AI coding agents will let us to modify browsers and OSes quickly. "Remove tracking from Chrome". "Privacy friendly Android, in particular, allow geo location spoofing"

Cookies, in and of themselves, are not bad. Like any tool that can be misused, they're just being abused by a ton of really shitty people in an effort to try to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Cookies do solve a valid problem on the web, that being "How do we maintain 'state' from one page request to the next in a stateless protocol like HTTP(s)?"

Now we have a new (nearly impossible) problem to solve. "How do we prevent bad actors from abusing pretty much any feature of a public system which can possibly be abused, or reliably catch and punish the people who try?"