Basically title. Recently I saw a new option in Chromium website permission settings called “allow access to local network” or something like that and I know some antiviruses on Windows that can list all devices connected to the same WiFi network. I’m usually using Firefox based browsers that obviously don’t have the option to disable or enable that access. So can some really invasive websites mine data about my local network, connected devices etc? And if so, what can I do to prevent it except for just disconnecting everything else when visiting such websites?
Any extensions or mitigations you use can be detected and used to increase the fingerprint of your browser/device even more.
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/
If I visit that page I get a “fingerprinting activity detected” warning from JShelter and then a mostly blank page with “FP ID: Computing…” at the top, and a bunch of javascript errors in the console.
Most sites are fine with the settings where I normally leave them, but it’s not much of a surprise for one that’s devoted entirely to browser fingerprinting to be broken by JShelter. Stopping or at least making more difficult most fingerprinting attempts is among the things it does.
WebWorker is disabled by default in JShelter which is required for creepjs to work. If you set just that function to Strict instead of just the default Remove, then creepjs still works fine.
But creepjs could be modified to work without webworker if you were thinking JShelter really does something useful to hide your fingerprint from someone who wants it bad enough. And you can still be fingerprinted many other ways even without JavaScript at all.
Yeah my main browser is easily fingerprinted due to the many ways it is non-standard. I’ll use torbrowser or something if it actually matters. But JShelter does not really make that problem worse for most people, and it probably frustrates some fraction of attempts — including those that rely on web workers apparently.
The page load time of creepjs would not be acceptable for use in real life. Anything with that much creepy js is going to get itself blocked by other means.
Mullvad browser uBlock jshelter privacybadger NoScript