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tomrittervgtoday at 3:05 AM0 repliesview on HN

> Ultimately most fingerprinting technologies use features that are intended behavior

Strong disagree.

> IP address/cookies/useragent obviously are useful

Cookies are an intended tracking behavior. IP Address, as a routing address, is debatable.

> Canvas/font rendering is useful for some web features

These two are actually wonderful examples of taking web features and using them as a _side channel_ in an unintended way to derive information that can be used to track people. A better argument would be things like Language and Timezone which you could argue "The browser clearly makes these available and intends to provide this information without restriction." Using side channels to determine what fonts a user has installed... well there's an API for doing just that[0] and we (Firefox) haven't implemented it for a reason.

n.b. I am Firefox's tech lead on anti-fingerprinting so I'm kind of biased =)

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Local_Font_...