Information Security Asked on October 28, 2021
Today I switched ON the "Responsive Design Mode" under the "Web Developer" Section of the Firefox menu, and from the dropdown menu selected "iPhone X/XS iOS 12".
So now every webpage I visited was being sent the request that the screen size of my device was "375×812".
My question is that, can this method enhance my protection against browser fingerprinting(assuming I also take some other precautions)? Because the websites now wouldn’t be able to know my original aspect ratio/screen resolution, and above 2 iPhones are quite common too(I am using a laptop).
I earlier tried to scale the Firefox window to nearly the aspect ratio of a mobile phone, but that didn’t make any differnce at all.
Note:
(i) In the context of this question my adversaries are only the companies and their websites,and not the Governments & ISPs.
(ii) I am just asking about the effect of this method on my browser’s fingerprint, that is, whether it will increase or decrease the uniqueness of my fingerprint. Be advised: I am not using this as the only method.
(iii) Firefox version: 78.0.2
(iv) OS: some linux distro.
There is no single fingerprinting method. But assuming that the fingerprinting you fear tries to be as granular as possible it will not only include easily fakeable things like User-Agent header but will also include things like font rendering, canvas performance etc - see here for some extensive but still incomplete and somewhat outdated list of ways to identify a client.
In this case a system with the performance of a desktop, Linux specific font rendering but a reported screen size of an iPhone will likely stand out as even more unique than if the browser would have reported the real screen size.
Answered by Steffen Ullrich on October 28, 2021
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