I’ve just been playing around with https://browserleaks.com/fonts . It seems no web browser provides adequate protection for this method of fingerprinting – in both brave and librewolf the tool detects rather unique fonts that I have installed on my system, such as “IBM Plex” and “UD Digi Kyokasho” – almost certainly a unique fingerprint. Tor browser does slightly better as it does not divulge these “weird” fonts. However, it still reveals that the google Noto fonts are installed, which is by far not universal – on a different machine, where no Noto fonts are installed, the tool does not report them.

For extra context: I’ve tested under Linux with native tor browser and flatpak’d Brave and Librewolf.

What can we do to protect ourselves from this method of fingerprinting? And why are all of these privacy-focused browsers vulnerable to it? Is work being done to mitigate this?

  • lemmyreaderEnglish
    6•4 months ago

    Disable javascript, trying to get around fingerprinting with javascript enabled is an exercise in futility, and is especially risky with something as heavily monitored as tor.

    I like disabling JS myself for some web browsing but this can make fingerprinting easier because most people do enable JS, and I’ve read that with JS disabled certain things still can be detected through CSS files.