this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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398
Browser Fingerprinting And Why VPNs Won’t Make You Anonymous (hackaday.com)
submitted 2 days ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
102 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Amidst the glossy marketing for VPN services, it can be tempting to believe that the moment you flick on the VPN connection you can browse the internet with full privacy. Unfortunately this is quite far from the truth, as interacting with internet services like websites leaves a significant fingerprint. In a study by [RTINGS.com] this browser fingerprinting was investigated in detail, showing just how easy it is to uniquely identify a visitor across the 83 laptops used in the study.

As summarized in the related video (also embedded below), the start of the study involved the Am I Unique? website which provides you with an overview of your browser fingerprint. With over 4.5 million fingerprints in their database as of writing, even using Edge on Windows 10 marks you as unique, which is telling.

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[–] core@leminal.space 6 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Your fingerpeint is that you aren't fingerprinted. If you think a website is like "Gosh darn it those rapscallions foiled me again! Guess I can't track them now!" You're sorely mistaken. Get a user agent switcher and pretend to be a windows, chrome user to blend in with the rest of the masses.

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 1 points 12 hours ago

Good explanation.