hey guys, I’ve found this and I remember we had a discussion about the firefox google friendly behaviour. Read this article (and follow the bug reports maybe) is an interesting 13,4 min. coffeebreak: https://fingerprintjs.com/blog/external-protocol-flooding/
So, what you folks are doing, how is your surfing setting? Are you surfing centralized with one browser? Have you ever heard about qubes, this VM based OS? What do you think about this concept of separating?
for anyone whos into the qubes OS, here might be an interesting topic to the question if VMs are protecting from fingerprinting. 
Cross-browser Tracking Vulnerablity and DispVMs - #2 by turkja - General Discussion - Qubes OS Forum
I don’t use Google in Firefox, Duck Duck Go is my primary search engine. Also why on earth would anyone install an app that has to go to the web to open it? When it comes to the Internet I am safe, as a user of the Internet you have to be cautious and I keep away from apps like Discord for instance, that relies solely on reading the web. It also seems a hell of a hard vulnerability to get going. This has been around for five years, yet why are we not hearing more about it?
I know that one day the Internet will go bang and that’ll be it, as time and time again I keep saying and seeing day by day the Internet getting slower and slower, with all of the telemetry rubbish from Microsoft, Google and other proprietary Internet companies use to use us as their product numbers selling advertising, not just that though. The invasion of privacy on Mobile Media devices constantly listening in, when you’re not even using the device, Facebook especially, as well as Amazon, Google and the like, just big brother listening in constantly collecting data. It can’t be just product advertising, their has to be another reason?
It’s these reasons why it will all go bang one day in my opinion.
I used to use DDG for searching, and don’t have huge issues with it from a privacy standpoint, but was often underwhelmed by the quality of the results it gave me. (I.e. searching for documentation on a product, would get me dozens of links to places that sold it, but NOT the manufacturer…) Remember that DDG is basically asking BING (who at one point just asked Google…) I recently learned about and switched to “Startpage” instead. They supposedly run their searches through a Dutch server, (so are protected by Dutch and EU privacy laws, and don’t keep logs of search requests. They pay to get their search results from Google, w/o adds, and all that Google gets is THEIR server address so no tracking… They do put in their own adds, which are clearly marked as such (and that is how they make their money) and are based strictly on your search terms, not any personal info…
In terms of the cross-browser tracking, I got strange results when I tried the demo page in the article in my install of Firefox (w/ lots of privacy plugins) and Vivaldi - In FF, it initially failed to run until I allowed it in NoScript. It then ran but crashed the Clearkey plugin, and said I had everything except Skype installed. Vivaldi said I had Skype installed, but none of the other apps tested. AFAIK I don’t have ANY of the apps mentioned installed, unless something else I installed added them w/o my consent…
The identifiers both contained a 1, F, U and 3V’s but in different orders, and both claimed to be 95+% unique…
What this means, I’m not sure - either the demo is full of excrement, or my browsers are feeding it bogus answers, but either way it seems they are coming up with some sort of ID…
I need to re-install Tor before I try it…
ex-Gooserider
I installed Tor, and ran the same demo, and got yet another set of results - it said I had Postman and Adobe installed (I don’t), and none of the others. Supposedly my identifier this time was “unique among 76112 tests so far”
Trying the other oddball browsers I have on the system -
Midori doesn’t do anything with the URL.
Falkon crashes
Dillo gives a message asking for JavaScript to be enabled (Doesn’t seem possible)
Konqueror opens a second window that seems to be trying to load something repeatedly and fails… after several minutes w/ no results I gave up and closed it.
So seven different browsers, four failed, three gave different identifiers, with three different sets of results, none of them “right” in terms of whats actually installed on my system…
So it would seem like worst case they could presumably track me as a somewhat unique individual for all the things I did using a single browser if every effort to exploit this gave the same results, but the only way to track me across browsers would be to get an identifier for each one, AND determine that the different identifiers (showing different system configurations) all actually were for the same system.
Seems like there are probably easier ways to track…
ex-Gooserider