The joint study leveraged privacy-preserving technologies like OHTTP to examine browser configurations across millions of release users. The team found that while commercial tracking scripts collect over 50 metrics, only eight measurements are needed to distinguish 80% of unique individuals. Operating systems require separate analysis because hiding the platform outright triggers major web compatibility issues. These findings allowed Mozilla to safely deploy focused mitigations in Firefox 143 that preserved website functionality.
Key points
Browser fingerprintability can be substantially mitigated by addressing a concise cluster…: Browser fingerprintability can be substantially mitigated by addressing a concise cluster of high-impact metrics rather than every identifiable data point.
Mitigations must be tailored to specific operating systems to avoid breaking essential we…: Mitigations must be tailored to specific operating systems to avoid breaking essential web compatibility across platforms.
Mainstream browsers can successfully lower tracking risks at scale without compromising n…: Mainstream browsers can successfully lower tracking risks at scale without compromising normal site functionality.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
Large-Scale Measurement and Real-World Mitigation of Web Browser Fingerprinting in the Wild
1Mozilla Corporation · 2University of Toronto · 3UC San Diego
This is the companion site to a study Mozilla ran on browser fingerprinting. With the help of almost 25 million Firefox release users, we measured how identifiable browsers really are, found which characteristics make them unique, and used that to design the fingerprinting protections that shipped in Firefox 143. Here you can read the paper and its key findings, browse the full appendix data the PDF had no room for, download the privacy-preserving aggregate data and analysis code, learn how the data was collected, and run an interactive test that compares your own browser against the measured population. If you have a question the data could answer, there is also a discussion board for proposing follow-up research.
Browser fingerprinting is a known tracking mechanism on the modern web, but its real-world effectiveness toward users has been hard to measure. To build robust protections, we measured uniqueness across a large, unbiased population, to determined what individual metrics cause users…
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