An interesting take on browser extensions which hope to prevent fingerprinting
With respect to native browser functionality:
Browser vendors have already invested a considerable amount of work into anti-fingerprinting. However, they usually limited themselves to measures which wouldn’t break existing websites…
And extensions:
Privacy protection extensions on the other hand aren’t showing as much concern. So they will typically do something like:
screen.width = 1280;
screen.height = 1024;
There you go, the website will now see the same display resolution for everybody, right? Well, that’s unless the website does this:
delete screen.width; delete screen.height;
And suddenly screen.width and screen.height are restored to their original values…
Same thing with Firefox’s “Don’t track me” feature. Turning it on might have the adverse effect of making you more trackable.
Makes me still a little sad every time I think about it. :/