I write to better educate myself as I go through CTFs and Bug Bounties. If anything I have written is incorrect, please let me know and send me a link to an article to read to better educate myself.
Location
Seattle
Education
Information Technology BA and Software Engineering Bootcamp Grad
Hi Sung,
Thanks for the comment! As far as I understand it, unless you are able to hide your Internet traffic completely a site can still track you. It might be more "anonymous" but they are still able to make a bit of a unique profile on the information that they get and don't get. The lack of specific information is still information. And depending if they sell their data or can pool it with a parent company, they might be able to piece together a pattern out of their profile.
The lack of specific information is still information.
Browsers expose so many environment "variables", the very specific combination of them all make you unique. If you generalize your IP, it is just one variable, which even then can be narrowed down to IP ranges used by your VPN provider and VPN nodes (endpoint locations) you connect most often.
I bet, the best option is to hide in plain sight, even then it could be hard - being too generic in all positions is something unique. It's hard to fool statistics and analytics.
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Thanks DaNeil for the post.
Scary how I can be tracked with the digital fingerprint (even though I use VPN).
Hi Sung,
Thanks for the comment! As far as I understand it, unless you are able to hide your Internet traffic completely a site can still track you. It might be more "anonymous" but they are still able to make a bit of a unique profile on the information that they get and don't get. The lack of specific information is still information. And depending if they sell their data or can pool it with a parent company, they might be able to piece together a pattern out of their profile.
Thank you for the detailed information, DaNeil 😀
So would there be no way to mask the identity (say even using Tor Browser)?
As DaNeil wrote -
Browsers expose so many environment "variables", the very specific combination of them all make you unique. If you generalize your IP, it is just one variable, which even then can be narrowed down to IP ranges used by your VPN provider and VPN nodes (endpoint locations) you connect most often.
I bet, the best option is to hide in plain sight, even then it could be hard - being too generic in all positions is something unique. It's hard to fool statistics and analytics.