Post #2450090

2026-05-12 18:20 UTC

What’s the canvas graphic thing (item 2) you are explaining here? Canvas is a special “place”/way of drawing images on a website. It can be used for fingerprinting since different gpus/drivers etc draw things a little differently. Basically a script on a page draws thousands of shapes, pictures whatnot on a canvas you can’t see i.e. is placed somewhere out of the standard view area. Then the script calculates some kind of hash or checksum. Combine that with other fingerprinting characteristics you’ll get pretty nicely unique browsers. For example LibreWolf blocks canvas by default for everyone and randomizes the canvas data on every read. If you happen to use a site that uses the canvas for legitimate purposes you won’t ever see what’s supposed to be there by the original design.

Replies (1)

@AuroraSine@lemmy.ml 2026-05-12 18:45

Hi. Thanks for the comment! The confusion likely comes from the automatic translation of my German page. Sorry. When I wrote ‘We distort this graphic,’ I didn’t mean that I manually change it. I meant that the browser setting privacy.resistFingerprinting automatically spoofs the Canvas data for you. So, to answer your question about ‘Item 2’: It refers to enabling privacy.resistFingerprinting = true in Firefox’s about:config. Once this is active, the browser automatically returns a generic, identical Canvas image to every website, preventing them from creating a unique fingerprint based on your GPU. It’s a built-in feature, not a manual process. Hope that clears it up. Please let me know if anything is still unclear or if I made any mistakes. My English isn’t great, so I’m using a translator, and I want to make sure I’m communicating correctly!

Open ##2450287