Privacy analysis of Tiktok’s app and website

Re:Privacy analysis of Tiktok’s app and website by gilfillan9 on Saturday December 07, 2019 @08:01AM (#21730046)

CSS media queries themselves don't have the capability to send any tracking information back, but the effects they cause absolutely do. Consider:

  @media (min-width: 600px) { .pixel { background-image: url("/pixel?width=600"); } }
  @media (min-width: 700px) { .pixel { background-image: url("/pixel?width=700"); } }

You could add as many of these media queries as you like to increase the resolution of your tracking. Combine this with the min-height media query and you can get the absolute size of the view port.

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Re:Privacy analysis of Tiktok’s app and website by shakna on Saturday December 07, 2019 @09:43AM (#21730492)

That's still more finite than what JS can report, and can be easily broken by browser prefetching. (And could have performance implications that could drive users away.)

Whilst it's better-than-nothing fingerprinting, it is still far less effective than JS having access to the window and height properties directly.

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