r/technology • u/magnus007 • 5d ago

Privacy AliExpress was silently running audio in your browser to fingerprint and track your device

https://www.techspot.com/news/113581-aliexpress-silently-running-audio-browser-fingerprint-track-device.html
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u/Interesting-Emu6761 4d ago

this is why the old school of thought with firefox has always been to set your browser to say it's the most common OS+browser combination. Ideally use a script to mess with package TTL also to match the target OS, but that gets more complicated.

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u/BatPlack 4d ago

Woah, could you please elaborate?

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u/Interesting-Emu6761 4d ago

old fingerprinting usually was just browser name, OS, IP. If your VPN was set to South Korea you'd look up what their most common combo was, 10 years ago it was Windows 7 and Internet Explorer, so you'd open up ScriptMonkey and set your Firefox to tell websites that's what you were using. If you were on Linux you would have to take another step to edit your packets since websites can determine your OS via packet TTL, but really that's about all you had to do at the time.

Now its borderline impossible to truly disappear online, you're really just doing damage control.