evercookie VS user.js

For a bad actor, this is easily work-around-able using various local persistence mechanisms like evercookie. https://samy.pl/evercookie/

If you're talking about the https://samy.pl/evercookie script, for what it's worth, you can defeat it (at least I can with my settings and no extensions) by...

This reminded me of something I haven't thought about in awhile: evercookie - https://github.com/samyk/evercookie

Sure, as Sevetarion said earlier "There is no actual cooke, it's just a metaphor". In contrast to "fingerprinting" a user's unique device configuration (as the rest of this demo does), anti-tracking folks use the term "cookie" broadly to refer to various ways sites can store unique values to be retrieved later. This usage grew out of Samy Kamkar's awesome "Evercookie" work in 2010 (later aka "supercookie") https://samy.pl/evercookie/

Nothing comes to mind directly, sorry. It’s something I want to look deeper into myself as well. One cool thing to look at is evercookie which is a GitHub project that allows you to make tracking cookies and the likes. The repo itself hasn’t been updated in a while but can probably be a good source of information.

Evercookie and the Favicon vuln

Client side: Use Evercookie

Also note, something like the Evercookie may also still be a thing that works. It stores data not only in cookies, but also in everything else that can retain any form of state (localStorage, HTTP browser history, HTTP cache for custom fingerprinted images generated by the server, etc.), and if even one spot doesn't get cleared by the user, the script can re-populate all the spots making for a very persistent "cookie."

Re: firefox and privacy, if you want to use firefox for privacy, consider using https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js . There is a case to be made that Firefox (with arkenfox's user.js) is one of the best privacy-respecting but still fairly usable browsers.

For extensions, I recommend people follow the recommendations[1] in the arkenfox repo and either harden their firefox or use librewolf. Umatrix is unmaintained since 2019.

[1] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions

For macOS : Thunderbird and you can harden it even more with this : https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

only arkenfox

This article is shit. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/ is what you want.

If you make time to dig through settings and change them away from their official use (99% of users don't), then you should use a customized setup (in this case, a user.js). That way, you're good to go no matter what Firefox fork you use.

> Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime

Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/in...

[2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/

Like others have said you can customize the browser to the point that it doesn't even look like the default anymore. Or customize it to maximize privacy.