Soon they will be able to track you if you use Tor on the same machine you use Chrome with your real browsing.
[9 Points] Igjgxjgxjgxjtx:
[5 Points] None:
[deleted]
[2 Points] shillface:
This is slightly fucked. Although a defence would be a dedicated tor laptop unconnected to the real you... Or just use tails.
[1 Points] wombat2combat:
before you read the article: this is nothing new, borwsers reveal a lot of information about the os the users is using and his environment, so it should not be a surprise that it is possible to track users across different browsers. just use the Tor browser with the security slider set to high [ideally on tails] and you do not have to worry about it.
the title is misleading because the Tor browser aims to look exactly like all the other tor browsers and it does a good job at it. if you disable js it will get nearly impossible for anybody to still track you.
article:
Creepy new browser-tracking technique means there's nowhere left for you to hide
These days, everyone on the internet already knows if you're a dog. Thanks to a newly developed tracking technique, they may soon know even more.
Pennsylvania-based computer science professor Yinzhi Cao just unveiled a method that IEEE Spectrum reports makes "fingerprinting" across multiple web browsers possible — with a striking degree of accuracy. That means anyone looking to follow you around the internet — advertisers, credit card companies, or websites — can now do so even if you habitually switch from Firefox to Chrome to Safari.
Browser fingerprinting works by identifying a set of characteristics unique to a computer's hardware and software, using that information to create a "fingerprint" for the system in question. You may not realize it, but everything from your installed fonts to your screen resolution combines to form a profile of you that is identifiable approximately 91 percent of the time.
This tracking technique used to be defeated by switching browsers. Hop off of Firefox and onto Safari and you were good to go. That defense no longer works with Cao's new approach, although it is unclear if anyone is using it yet.
What's worse, a 99-percent success rate means his method is even more accurate than the old single-browser approach.
Would trading laptops help?
"From the negative perspective, people can use our cross-browser tracking to violate users' privacy by providing customized ads," Cao told Ars Technica. "Our work makes the scenario even worse, because after the user switches browsers, the ads company can still recognize the user. In order to defeat the privacy violation, we believe that we need to know our enemy well."
Fortunately for the aforementioned enemy, Cao has 8published the code online](https://web.archive.org/web/20170225205219/https://github.com/Song-Li/cross_browser). That's not entirely a bad thing, however: Knowing how it works also allows computer scientists to attempt some sort of defense.
And how does it work? The short answer is that it's complicated. "Specifically, our approach utilizes many novel OS and hardware level features, such as those from graphics cards, CPU, and installed writing scripts," the paper reads. "We extract these features by asking browsers to perform tasks that rely on corresponding OS and hardware functionalities."
Thirty-six tasks, to be precise. These take under a minute to run, and were found to successfully work on many major browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Opera.
But all is not lost for the privacy-concerned, as this stab at cross-browser fingerprinting is not foolproof.
As with so many things on the internet, the solution is straightforward: Use Tor.
OP are you FUCKING STUPID? did you even read the article?