Privacy Badger is great and goes way beyond other anti-tracking and ad blockers. They also keep an eye on a lot of the CDNs to make sure they're not running sneaky stuff like canvas finger-printing or using local storage to bypass various protections.

I just wish Privacy Badger didn't force DNT to be enabled. Not only does the entire concept mean trusting the advertising companies implicitly, the header serves to differentiate your traffic.

You're worried about browser fingerprinting? Does any Firefox extension effectively counter that?

From my understanding blocking 3rd party JS is largely insufficient for accomplishing this, regardless of DNT settings.

You may be right regardless that it's better to appear as much like a stock browser as possible, in terms of privacy settings, so DNT should stay disabled. But in practical terms it might not make of a difference.

I don't know of any tools to block fingerprinting, but here's a cool tool by the EFF for testing how unique your browser is: https://panopticlick.eff.org

Panopticlick is a best guess, only. If you use exactly the same system twice, it should detect that. However, browsers and systems autoupdate frequently, and various other things that are fingerprinted are also not really fixed.

For a single browser session; this should work. Over months, it's harder. A tracker would needs to at least be quite aggressive and collect a lot of information to track you, and then be fairly clever in fuzzily matching that in the future if they want to track you over time.

Which isn't to say that short-to-medium term tracking is just fine, but it's not black and white either.

Yes, canvasblocker blocks one kind of fingerprinting. Combined with ublock (or privacybadger) + self destructing cookies and maybe decentraleyes, and a vpn, you are almost there...

Simple blockers actually do a lot of good here - because many of the things that will fingerprint you are not first party sites but 3rd party ad scripts.

None of these measures protect you against tracking, though. And if they don't, why use them? It's better to be honest with yourself and admit how effective tracking is nowadays.

Your user agent plus unique plugin installations plus fonts installed equals a unique fingerprint across IP addresses. The above isn't an exhaustive list, either. There are dozens of tricks to track you.

Facebook can't track you by those metrics if a filter like Privacy Badger blocks requests to their servers.

Is it really that effective? I admit I assumed it was hard to dodge the global advertisement apparatus, but maybe it's possible.

Example: jQuery is sometimes hosted on Google CDNs. You can't block that request without breaking the site, right? But that request sends all your info.

Yes, it's really that effective - blocking the facebook like button doesn't break most websites.

And typically a request for something like jquery from a CDN will contain little more than your IP address and cookies. You can even prevent the cookies from being sent if you want. The only way they could get away with more than this would be to modifying the resulting script to grab more info from your machine.

Isn't your IP address plus cookies enough to track you?

Yes, but they can be trivially blocked or discarded. My main point is that no advanced fingerprinting tactics can be used so the simple means work in the case of most site-breaking things. Privacy Badger eats CDN cookies - that's actually one of its main features, so it will prevent this kind of thing quite nicely without breaking websites.

The vast majority of people correlate 1:1 with IP address alone, so I'm not sure how effective this is. Nonetheless, that's pretty cool.

Privacy badger also blocks referrers to those sites - having only a connecting IP and asking for a copy of jquery isn't exactly privacy breaching in my eyes. Could be any one of many sites that wants it. Not much they can do with that information.

Only works on desktop browsers. Fingerprinting doesn't work on Safari iOS. Pretty sure stock Android is unreliable too.

You can also do that with uMatrix as well as with uBlock Origin.

Or Ghostery. I run it side by side with ublock Origin. It makes the web livable.