this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Privacy

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This is common for scraping even on desktop.

Dark mode, screen resolution, window size, and installed fonts are all tracking points plus hundreds more.

As I understand it, randomizing can make you stand out more as an outlier. Its better to blend with the herd. VPNs help by putting a bunch of clients behind the same IP, but if you stand out based on activity, an advanced enough algorithm may pick you out by what's static and by what's always changing.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

randomizing can make you stand out more as an outlier

I’m sure, but if you have a specific set of colors matching a specific picture on your phone that nobody else has, I imagine that would be more easily traceable than if it were automatically switched out every once in a while. Granted, the other aspects you mentioned might be enough to just render the effort redundant anyway.