Some of the data seems straight-up wrong.

I know this computer has more RAM than reported and it's definitely not on a 4G network either.

Also 1 in 6.2 billion for Safari on an iPhone. Also the explanation on the bottom is very small and AI generated.

Yeah seems like it doesn't account for anti-fingerprinting at all.

“ Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 311,902 tested in the past 45 days.” yet every cloudflare protected website blocks me, random human checks and also my bank and government is blocked. Mmmmm grain of salt?

This is better than the OP in practically every conceivable way

My understanding is that this tool only compares how identifiable you are compared to the other people who have previously visited the site.

I just downloaded a fresh install of LibreWolf to test this and it did indeed have a stable UUID for me at 1/62E6. Better than the 1/680E6 from regular Firefox, but still upsetting. Fonts and Audio fingerprinting seems to be where a lot of the entropy is coming from... Even after I enabled some of the flags to resist font enumeration it still is stable and high entropy. I'm not sure what to do to be honest about this, it is very discouraging.

Shocking, this site assigned me a UUID and I found it listed here! https://everyuuid.com/

Recently discussed prompts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48727059 [flagged] What any website can see about you

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062178 A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182352 Show HN: Modern Browsers Don't Need the Cookie Anymore

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46517654 [flagged] Show HN: DevicePrint – device fingerprinting without cookies

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037031 Show HN: Explore what the browser exposes about you

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45169286 Browser Fingerprint Detector

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49359153 A live browser fingerprinting and bot detection playground

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674460 Show HN: Anti-Detect.com – Browser Fingerprint Scanner

There are definitely more! Could this be HN's favourite prompt?

Not just the language. Its like all LLM front end design is working off one of three templates.

I was >60% sure it would be AI given the combination of calendar year and the wording "what the browser reveals" that I saw on the HN front page - and only when I clicked did I realise how wrong I was, because the actual probability is 100%.

(Not to suggest that browser fingerprinting isn't a useful issue to highlight.)

It's using all the Claude fonts, it's got the Claude pulsing indicators, it's got the Claude cards, and none of the writing is useful. This has gotta be up there with one of the most Claudey Claude sites I've ever seen

Edit: oh my, even the author's comments in this thread are written by Claude...

* You're absolutely right! ;-)

How would you prevent that? If you want to use a feature, you need to know if that feature is available. So you add methods/functions to ensure that you can fail gracefully when something is not available. That availability is the fingerprint. I don't blame the browsers as much as asshats using the tool for malicious purposes. We're not going to ban hammers because someone uses them for things other than driving nails.

There should be a browser that lies to websites instead of caving

Not usually, if you're comparing it to IPv4. Many ISPs give each customer a persistent IPv4 address that doesn't tend to change over time. Because most people use NAT (internal IP address != external IP address), a server you connect to can't identify the specific computer or device.

With IPv6, it's true that in many cases servers will see you as connecting from the specific IPv6 address of your computer/device. However, IPv6 addresses contain many parts, like:

  2001:db8:1234:5600 : abcd:1234:5678:9abc

where the left part is basically the equivalent of the unchanging IPv4 address you got from the ISP, and the right part identifies your specific device. But in most OSes the right part is randomly generated and changes on some cadence (e.g. daily).

So in many cases, the ability for a server to individually fingerprint your device solely based on the IP address is roughly equivalent between IPv4 and IPv6. (This isn't the case if the ISP does CGNAT on IPv4, where you're sharing your IPv4 address with many customers - this would be similar in magnitude to a VPN in terms of the ability for a server to fingerprint you based on IP.)

A VPN or Tor swaps it out entirely, which your browser fingerprint survives. It is a strong identifier, not a permanent one.

If it changes every load, that's your browser farbling canvas/audio per-read (Brave or Firefox), which means the anti-fingerprinting is working. We missed crediting that in v1, so it should read lower now if you reload.

Fun fact: some malware won't execute if it sees a Russian/Ukrainian keyboard layout, because the authors avoid hitting victims in their own jurisdiction.

unique is ideal, as long as you're differently unique to each site you visit

You even used an LLM to write your comment.

If you’re ESL, that’s not an excuse. You can write something in your own language and use a translator or even an LLM to translate it.

But using an LLM to write is delegating your cognition to a machine. At that point, you’re acknowledging that your own cognition has no value, so why are you trying to inflict a faked version of it on the rest of us?