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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Incognito window doesn't do what you think it does. Also it doesn't stop browser fingerprinting, even tor itself doesn't really take a win there.
yeah, the thing that stops browser fingerprinting on the threat level of ad companies is firefox's built-in protections (which are in fact stronger in incognito) and ublock origin; and umatrix, full script blocking, and probably prayers on tor's level.
what incognito does is it breaks apart your chain of regular cookies. those can still slip through a lot of these tools, especially when they're first-party, but they're also kinda low-tech because of being first party most of the time (while the third party ones are easily blocked by other tools). that way the trace you leave behind is not one long thing, but many small ones that are hard to connect.
incognito is just one layer of defense but it's an important one
Don't container tabs and FPI offer superior cookie tracking resistance?
With fingerprinting they developed new ways to find unique browsers by detecting how you render specific canvas elements and being able to unique identify you based on that since it's dependent on hardware, browser, OS etc... You can't really do anything about that. From what I've seen. That with other techniques gives a unique fingerpint for you even with Tor which standardizes as much information about you as possible to keep you in that large group of users so you are harder to identify.
Maybe Librewolf does a better job? Brave in my experience also didn't do any better than tor.
Container tabs are great for shit you log into, because they're like having a bunch of different, isolated browsers. For example, even if there was a YouTube embed here (which I haven't seen on Lemmy yet) it wouldn't be able to correlate those views to my account because I'm logged in in a different tab, from the way Google sees it it could be anyone on my network. Incognito is similar to that in that you grab a new browser every time and discard it whenever you close the last tab. It's great for transactional stuff, but a little inconvenient for stuff you want to keep logged into, which is where container tabs are great.
And yeah, there are some hella strong fingerprinting techniques, but no one is reimplementing any of those for advertising reasons. They just pull in a script from an ad company, which gets promptly blocked by uBlock Origin. If you use Tor and want to do some stuff that you really need to hide your identity for, you might run into some more advanced attempts to track you.