Fingerprint protection prevents websites from collecting user information
All the Companies and advertising agencies today usually implement a series of mechanisms in order to be able create a user profile and make use of the information collected to create advertising campaigns, show the user products that may be of interest, among other things.
And it is that for a long time, various techniques used to be used, of which the best known were cookies, which not long ago ended up ceasing to be used due to the user data protection measures implemented by most of the web browsers.
This has led to a "battle" between user privacy and advertising agencies. to create more and more advanced methods based on fingerprinting, which in turn has also led independent developers and web browsers to create tools to prevent this.
The reason for thinking about the matter a bit is that recently the author of the arkenfox project, announced that they are working on Firefox the development of new tools used to avoid the identification of users, the “fingerprinting”.
For those of you who are unaware of fingerprinting, you should know that it refers to the formation of browser identifiers in passive mode based on indirect signs, such as screen resolution, a list of supported MIME types, specific parameters in headers (HTTP /2 and HTTPS), analysis of installed plugins and fonts, availability of certain web APIs, analysis of browsing history, video card-specific rendering functions with WebGL and Canvas, CSS manipulation, analysis of mouse and keyboard functions, as well as methods to store identifiers, among other things.
Regarding the works in which Firefox is found, it is mentioned that up to now it is known that, plans to support two built-in implementations of hidden identity protection (there are also external protection plugins, such as CanvasBlocker):
- RFP (Resist Fingerprinting): This is a Tor Browser-adapted fingerprinting protection implementation that has been available for a long time via the "privacy.resistFingerprinting" setting in about:config.
- FFP (Future Fingerprinting Protection): This is a new "lightweight" implementation that is intended to resolve some usability issues in RFP, which have long been reported on bugzilla.mozilla.org for issues. The "privacy.fingerprintingProtection" setting is provided in about:config to enable FFP.
It is mentioned that both implementations can be enabled at the same time, applying the most restrictive protection and that the disadvantage and at the same time the advantage of the existing protection (RFP), is that it is active simultaneously in all windows and tabs, except for plugins (that is, the protection is enabled or disabled for all windows and tabs, no selective activation).
On one hand, this does not allow users to disable the protection of monopolistic sites with whom the user cannot refuse to work and who, due to their influence, can present users with ultimatums, even forcing them to use Chrome. On the other hand, the proposed approach does not allow less powerful sites to commit such abuses, since the user is likely to simply go to another site and not disable protection specifically for him.
At the same time, the presence of influential sites that refuse to work when using protection does not allow enabling protection by default - the user will simply switch to Chromium-based browsers, whose privacy protection methods are significantly inferior. to those of Firefox. Another benefit of RFP is that having a single switch makes it easy to integrate complex features across different browser subsystems, reducing the number of system states to consider.
As for the new FFP protection system, its main advantage is the possibility of more flexible settings: more than 60 protection aspects have been proposed, the inclusion of which can be configured through the parameter «privacy.fingerprintingProtection.overrides«. Among other things, disabling protection for certain services is supported, as well as with a low level of site disruption; it is possible to enable it by default.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.