They’re really playing up the ominous tone.
“We know this because your IP address — xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx — was the first thing your device sent us. We know the rest of it. We chose not to display it. Most pages would not have made that choice. We did not ask for your location. Your address arrived before you did.”
Uh, yeah. That’s how IP addresses work.
Yeah, a bit overly ominous. But my mom doesn’t know that’s how IP addresses work. And if it scares a bit more privacy mindedness into her, good.
Well yes, but most people don’t even know that part. I guess it’s not the worst thing to tell them?
Language and dark mode setting are also funny. Yes, I literally want to share those preferences so you don’t serve me a blinding white website in hebrew. What a hacker you are.
I am pretty sure 90% of the people using the Internet don’t know what an IP address is.
Didn’t realize my phone sent it’s rotation data without promoting, everything else is kind of needed to send me info.
My IP
My screen size
My interactions with the page
I wasn’t aware about the thing with fonts.
Heheh, a whole lot of mocking in this thread, but I don’t mind the site / its display.
Yeah, it’s overly melodramatic in its setup, and a bunch of the information doomerism is silly in terms of the info basically being required to provide data comms etc. It also tends to get things a bit wrong in a few categories – like for me, it said I was in a totally different city (still the right country at least - Canada), then it said my time zone was in iceland, which is kinda… no.
But the general message of the site, and the awareness its trying to raise in regards to how much data gets shared for basic comms establishment, and how that information gets used to fingerprint people, is worthwhile.
It got the country wrong for me. I didn’t use a VPN or anything. So that’s good I guess.
Hm, wonder why that’d be – it implies heavily that it bases the country on the IP address, which in theory is done by looking at what company the address is registered to, for the most part. Like I’m guessing it got my city wrong, because it used an address that the ISP provides for the IP range, which isn’t the same as the city I’m in, because the ISP uses it to cover numerous cities around the broader region. I reckon if you’re using something like Starlink, or other similar international-ish provider that may be very loose in how they associated addresses, it’d fail most times.
I was on mobile data, who knows where the mobile network gets their connection from
Ah, makes some sense. The mobile networks are even more erratic with how they assign IPs – though I’d still be a little surprised if it was the wrong country entirely. It’d imply the provider is using IPs from a single range in multiple legal jurisdictions, which’d inherently make things like geofencing more difficult. Sorta like VPN functionality to access foreign data regions, as a result of sloppy configuration and negligence by the ISP. Wonder if it could also be something to do with IPV6 – I think that’s more common to see amongst mobile networks, and I’m honestly not too sure how well that can get mapped to geo locations – I’d doubt the site, how its put together, would be tryin too hard to sort that out.
This is lame as shit. The tone of the writing is going to get non-tech people feeling quite dismissive, or scared enough to seek out surface level info, which just rolls back into feeling dismissive. It’s actually really stupid because they’re clearly driving fear, but hardly touch the real thing to be scared of. Fingerprinting is barely mentioned, it’s only really addressed once, in the font identification section. The issue with all these data points is how they can be collected and correlated across the web - it basically means fuck-all if it’s only from one page.
edit: On top of that, each data point is presented as some sort of horrible catastrophe, when some are completely benign. Barely addressing why some points actually matter, or not at all. (Like click/touch data, it’s needed for site functionality, but it gets creepy when that data is used for things like psychological profiling)
Even more disappointing because the formatting/appearance is more than clean enough to share with basically anyone. Yet the tone and focus makes that out of the question. What a waste of time to make this.
The location is off by about fifty miles. It didn’t get my GPU or battery level. Everything else is stuff that doesn’t matter. Firefox browser, English, android device. I am not terribly impressed.
You’re right, and same for me, but what if you’d never considered any of this before and are new to the idea of privacy? I expect it would then give you pause for thought.
Sure, it’s a gimmick site. But it serves a useful purpose for those who don’t know about the topic. Which is probably the majority of users.
Despite my own experience: TIL the tilt angle of my phone is available to websites.
I guess I was mostly put off by the sensationalism. Everything is saturated with it these days.
You made an interesting point though, about people being new to this. I’m an old man. The internet wasn’t even a thing until I was in my early teens. It was sort of a Wild West situation for a while there and guarding personal info was the norm. But these days information gathering is built into every device, website, app, etc. To people growing up with this now it probably seems like it’s just the way things are done and nothing to worry about. I can see it being useful for pointing that out. I think it would be more useful though if it focused more on showing how to counteract these things, rather than just being scary.
Try Deviceinfo.me
Now that one goes after a whole lot more info than the other. I was pretty happy to see the amount of “unknown” and “permission not granted or denied” responses though.
That’s not necessarily great either though, because that “unknown” becomes your unique fingerprint that almost no one else has. Ideally you to have spoofed information with the most common parameters, or even better, randomized ones.
Very useful site. Thanks for posting this.
There are multiple sites like this, for example clickclickclick.click has been around for 10 years (not optimized for mobile)
Your browser accepts cookies. Websites can write small files to your device that persist after you leave — files that identify you when you return, that follow you across sites, that remember what you looked at, what you almost bought, and how long you hesitated. We have not written one. Your browser would let this page write up to 10 GB to your device — a private room, ours alone, like the one given to every site you visit.
Hol up … 10 GB?
I think that refers to localStorage not cookies.
Time zone has no info about where I actually am. Sure, I’m in a particular vertical slice of the earth. I have the JP keyboard downloaded, but you’re wrong, that doesn’t mean I speak Japanese. In fact, I speak French but your cookie reading didn’t pick that up.
It is genuinely interesting what info gets passed to websites but the doomy tone is rather silly and will unnecessarily worry people who don’t know much about computers/Internet, which is the majority of users.
My time zone is quite specific and has only about 500,000 people in it
Assuming it’s tz database timezones then they can be relatively specific. Since the slices are based around laws governing current time, there’s hundreds of slices rather than just a couple dozen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones Alongside things like keyboard downloaded it means you can be uniquely fingerprinted (or close to unique) pretty easily, which means they can then associate all sorts of other information with you
It got my timezone and location pretty spot on, though.
We know your full name, blood type, and that your left elbow is itching a bit right now. Your browser told us. But we’re choosing to not show you. We also know what you did on July 14, 2018.
They just told me, you should be ashamed
Lol it says I have a “recent, high end device”… It’s a Samsung that’s old enough to be in the third grade.
Only thing that’s missing is a bunch of threats with a Bitcoin address at the bottom.
I’m guessing it has inferred that (wrongly) from your screen size and resolution.
That’s not a great datapoint, if that’s the case, there’s 2015 phones that are unnecessarily 4K (right when 4K TVs were becoming popular)
Well I am happy with my results… You ain’t gettin shit
I thinks I’m in a town 2 hours south of where I’m at, but it got the time zone wrong by three hours.
It’s a light version of what websites apps collect
meh
