this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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All that's going to achieve is that every browser on the planet will identify itself as Chrome in the user-agent string.
Which will not work, or so-so at best thanks to fingerprinting. I get the need for such services , and they are doing absolutely amazing work on encryption of traffic, but even if they are well-meaning, it is a massive surveillance and traffic control point, in easy reach of an extremist government. And this news worries me a lot.
Fingerprinting fear is eh. The server only receives what the browser sends to it, plus your IP address. The browser fully controls what it sends, and it only sends identifying data because advertisement companies pay browser vendors to add this data. There is no technical reason why fingerprinting is even possible. Everything - your OS version, your cookies, your mouse movement - can be faked or anonymozed.
If you configure your browser to do so. Average Joe and Jane won’t. That aside, preventing fingerprinting is really hard; ask the Tor Browser team how much effort they have to put into this.