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by yamrzou·4y ago·view on hn ↗
> your fingerprint stays the same even if your browser is in incognito mode.

OK, I tried the demo with Firefox Focus, and it worked. But it doesn't tell you how unique your fingerprint is. If multiple users have the same fingerprint, then its effectiveness will be limited.

4 comments
Yeah. As I understand it, since all Apple mobile browsers use the WebKit engine, there’s nothing this demo can use to separate them.

This demo doesn’t mention cookies. screen size, cache, etc, which could be used to further differentiate.

This article is less of a tech demo and more of an introductory article to how some fingerprinting works.

Browser fingerprinting has hash collisions so you basically get a bloom filter. Browser fingerprint plus ip is probably enough to track, but I'd imagine if you bring the device to another city or even a coffeeshop that there's too many similar devices to uniquely identify.
I don't think this is intended to provide an actual fingerprinting solution like EFF's Cover Your Tracks, but rather a demo of non-obvious noscript-proof data points.

If these techniques were combined with more well-known such as screen size or DPI, uniqueness would be more relevant.

Right. What is the entropy?