Post #3473520
2026-06-21 08:53 UTC
Replies (1)
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@AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 2026-06-21 16:12
It’s a little more complicated than that. Should every request you make to a site require EVERY single language the site is translated in to be sent? That’s many times more bandwidth, and would make your page load speeds tens of times slower by default. If that’s not possible, then they know your language and likely general region. Want to stay signed in to a website, or have a site remember your settings? You can’t do that without some form of persistent authentication mechanism like a cookie, which can also be used to fingerprint you. If you don’t want that, you’ll have to sign back in to every single website every single time you open a tab for that site. A site might send all its contents and let your browser format it without revealing its screen size… but what about if the content necessarily has to be different for different screens? A desktop layout for a site won’t work well on mobile, after all. What about the times you browse? Unless you want some of your page loads to randomly take extra hours to happen just to obscure your time zone, that’s a data point too. Oh, also no interactive code that sends data back to a server can run because it could be used to fingerprint your device’s general model, OS, and GPU/CPU hardware. Say goodbye to basically all web-based games, file converters, image editors, video players, etc. Now add in your mouse and keyboard movements, topics of interest, and any data you voluntarily reveal about yourself on any website. This is why I say this is more a legal problem for prevention than a technical one. Preventing most of this fingerprinting also necessarily means destroying the functionality of the web.