Everyone talks about how evil browser fingerprinting is, and it is, but I don’t get why people are only blaming the companies doing it and not putting equal blame on browsers for letting it happen.
Go to Am I Unique and look at the kind of data browsers let JavaScript access unconditionally with no user prompting. Here’s a selection of ridiculous ones that pretty much no website needs:
- Your operating system (Isn’t the whole damn point of the internet that it’s platform independent?)
- Your CPU architecture (JS runs on the most virtual of virtual environments why the hell does it need to know what processor you have?)
- Your JS interpreter’s version and build ID
- List of plugins you have installed
- List of extensions you have installed
- Your accelerometer and gyroscope (so any website can figure out what you’re doing by analyzing how you move your phone, i.e. running vs walking vs driving vs standing still)
- Your magnetic field sensor AKA the phone’s compass (so websites can figure out which direction you’re facing)
- Your proximity sensor
- Your keyboard layout
- How your mouse moves every moment it’s in the webpage window, including how far you scroll, what bit of text you hovered on or selected, both left and right clicks, etc.
- Everything you type on your keyboard when the window is active. You don’t need to be typing into a text box or anything, you can set a general event listener for keystrokes like you can for the mouse.
If you’re wondering how sensors are used to fingerprint you, I think it has to do with manufacturing imperfections that skew their readings in unique ways for each device, but websites could just as easily straight up record those sensors without you knowing. It’s not a lot of data all things considered so you likely wouldn’t notice.
Also, canvas and webGL rendering differences are each more than enough to 100% identify your browser instance. Not a bit of effort put into making their results more consistent I guess.
All of these are accessible to any website by default. Actually, there’s not even a way to turn most of these off. WHY?! All of these are niche features that only a tiny fraction of websites need. Browser companies know that fingerprinting is a problem and have done nothing about it. Not even Firefox.
Why is the web, where you’re by far the most likely to execute malicious code, not built on zero trust policies? Let me allow the functionality I need on a per site basis.
Fuck everything about modern websites.
Let’s be careful how we phrase things here. JavaScript form submission and navigation are choices, not needs.
Also, progressive enhancement / graceful degradation exists. When competent developers (or bosses) want script effects on our sites, we can include them and make the sites continue to function with scripts disabled. It might require more work, but it is absolutely possible.
Framing the script-based approaches to these things as if they were needs contributes to the problem, IMHO.
(I am referring to the vast majority of web sites, of course, not special-purpose web applications like games.)
Navigation is a need.
It can be done without JS
You don’t even need to be competent. Being obsessed works too.
The problem is, a manager will just get an intern with 0 web experience and hand them WordPress.
I’m am ex web dev/des and still maintain some websites for non-profits. I think you underestimate the human stupidity factor. I already have to front an infuriating level of stupid questions and problems that people have caused themselves by not following the most simple of directions. Do I like JavaScript? No. Do I wish I could completely ditch it? 100%. But people are stupid. And without it’s use, I would be handling even more CS than I am now. The average person expects a website to act a certain way and without that they lose their minds.
Homie the web platform I’ve been tasked with helping keep running/update is ASP Web forms and the lack of asynchronous updating is pretty annoying to work with in a ticketing software.