Privacy

49644 readers

375 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

Linux has /etc/machine-id and you forgot to setup your init daemon to periodically truncate and regenerate a new machine-id so you can be tracked via user telemetry analytics. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ultimately, the problem is much bigger than /etc/machine-id since there are dozens of hardware IDs on any PC that can be used by malicious telemetry to silently to uniquely identify and track you, and the only solution to this problem currently is to make sure you really trust any software you use.

Systemd, in particular, acts a lot like malware for Linux because if you try to reset your machine-id a long list of stuff that breaks in in it. You could make a cron script to reset /etc/machine-id every day, but machine-id is so deep in the stack that you'd also have to reboot to ensure it's updated.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 5 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

I tried librewolf to see if it reads /etc/machine-id. It does not. At least not to my trials so far. I used the strace cmd to watch it. I tried when starting librewofl. And again when loading various sites.

LW does read MANY font related files from /etc. That could be a fingerprint ofc. Esp if a site reads back the canvas! Fonts are a majority of what LW reads from /etc. LW also reads /etc/os-release. IDK what it does with that. That file does not have a unique machine id, but it ids your OS and version. There are a few others too. Like /etc/localtime.

IDK about Firefox. I didn't try it. Maybe it would be much worse. Someone can try and report here about it?

My guess is, every normal browser can be accurately fingerprinted. Even with fingerprint resistance like FF forks. Esp if JS is enabled!! There are just toooo many ways. ID resolution services are used by most big sites now. They employ very smart and clever data scientists. I doubt we can block every method they have, in a good enough way.

Tor Browser tries! But that is blocked by sites that use identity resolution. Also, TBH I don't even believe Tor can block enough fingerprinting. Some like TLS fingerprints are not even blockable by a browser.

[–] kuerbiskernoel@feddit.org 3 points 3 hours ago

What about terminal browsers?

[–] Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

You ever tried Kodachi linux?

[–] TwilightKiddy@programming.dev 1 points 17 hours ago

I'd guess it's some standardized way to determine which OS the browser is running under? Like it does not report the specific Linux version in the user agent header, but it does say that it's Linux and it's architecture. I'd assume there is just some standardized library for it and for Linux the easiest way to know where the hell your binary got launched is /etc/os-release.