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I’m just not convinced it can fool google and meta
Yea, this is a great and healthy skepticism to have. It’s why I went deep on this little research tangent.
Besides browser fingerprinting, there are many other ways to tie you to online behavior. For instance, the DAITA thing has nothing to do with browser fingerprints, but specifically the size of your inbound and outbound traffic. The NSA uses that to figure out your behavior and link on-VPN and off-VPN traffic together with great success, regardless of how many hops you go through. It’s the behavior that gives you away.
I’m always on my VPN, reconnect at random times, and have all the extras turned on. Something else that may be a factor is that I have Mullvad Browser installed via Flatpak and is sandboxed to hell. Maybe you installed via .deb or something in Mint?
Any way, thanks again for humoring me in this! I think you’re right that at least you are sorta getting lumped in with others, but it’s never going to be 100% foolproof and we should all plan for that.
I see, I’ve never looked super deep into F-Droid or released anything there, I didn’t realize that a requirement for releasing on F-Droid was that they build it. Just read their inclusion criteria, interesting.
ETA: Read through the whole article, and godamn. I don’t really trust anything Android any way, but this is actually a pretty damn big WTF from F-Droid. Thanks for sharing!