Of course, it would be better still if there was a standard way of setting up specific URL patterns under specific domains to automatically launch an associated desktop app if that app is installed. iOS can already do this through the "/.well-known/apple-app-site-association" URL on the domain. It's why Zoom and Teams links, when opened on an iOS device, always go straight into the native app once that app is installed.
Edit to add: BTW, the file at the well-known Apple path also gives me a way of detecting a Zoom invite URL in one of my own products, even though Zoom URLs can have custom domains.
The "PWA" standard for "/.well-known/apple-app-site-association" is "related_applications" [0] in the Web App Manifest standard and specifically here where "prefer_related_applications" [1] is set to true.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest/relate...
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest/prefer...
https://zoom.us/.well-known/apple-app-site-association - 200 OK
https://www.microsoft.com/.well-known/apple-app-site-associa... - 404 Not Found
If you go to the actual Teams site, it does have the apple-app-site-association link.
https://teams.microsoft.com/.well-known/apple-app-site-assoc...
Don't assume malice, but do consider side effects of your decisions.
This does add an extra bit to web-fingerprinting, it's only 1 bit. Someone intentionally trying to add fingerprinting could do much more malicious things. Unique font names or uniquely generated font w varying letter widths could completely de-anonymize a user. This seems scoped to identifying team-viewer users, not identifying/fingerprinting individuals.
Just knowing you have a font or TeamViewer, like just knowing your IP or viewport size, isn't fingerprinting your device.
The action of taking your fingerprint to identify you is fingerprinting. Providing you a handrail without a purpose of identifying you, even though it happens to take your fingerprint for anyone else, is not fingerprinting. Changing your fingerprint is not fingerprinting.
This is an abuse of a technology with more harm then benefit if you ask me. Calling it "fingerprinting" is still a category error.
Here's what the Electronic Frontier Foundation says about fingerprinting.
"""Digital fingerprinting is the process where a remote site or service gathers little bits of information about a user's machine, and puts those pieces together to form a unique picture, or "fingerprint," of the user's device"""
From: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/what-fingerprinting
Here what TeamViewer is doing isn't fingerprinting. it's not combining unrealated bits of information to uniquely identify a user/computer. it's looking at literally one bit of information to identify whether the current non-uniquely-known user is in a -large- group or not, the group of "computers with teamviewer installed".
it can be claimed that this is adding to the bits that can improve a third party's ability to uniquely identify a user/computer, but that's a different claim, that's not what teamviewer is doing.
Eventually, everything will be collected using an actual use case — contacts, photos etc. — and the AI will process it and make deepfakes of anything.
We won’t be able to trust any video evidence. The future is about watermarking and signing stuff using your own private keys. And even then, someone can just announce their private keys somewhere and have plausible deniability after that. Too many such renunciations though would be suspicious.
The world is going to be as unfamiliar to us, breaking enough of our assumptions, as when people didn’t know about gramophones and televisions and instant communication, assuming that it would take time for a messenger to get a message out. Today we expect a ton of info to flow over always-on connections. Similarly our assumptions about identity and privacy and democracy are going to be totally smashed by AI and bots soon.
Swarms of bots using GPT-4 and deepfakes will be able to drown out the vanishingly tiny amount of information that all the humans writing online produce, and adversarial networks will make them far more effective at convincing a crowd of humans thay X event happened or to support Y policy, or even rewrite history and science. The sams way that AlphaZero defeated AlphaGo which defeated human players, because it had far more combinations than all humanity combined did, and then downloaded the learnings to each node (Leela and others do the same).
All that is missing is decentralized swarms of bots, that have no single point of failure, and can update their weights autonomously.
I will go even further and say that CAPTCHAs will become irrelevant. Humans won’t be the primary economic actor for online services, because botnets will control far more capital and everyone will do some work for a botnet, such as being a caretaker etc. No one will even know or care who is giving the assignment or writing to them anymore.
The sad part about this is that botnets based on GPT3 and deepfakes are simply bullshittes that don’t understand things like Cyc — they literally throw bullshit at a wall and see what sticks. It’s sad but this will collectively outperform collective human reasoning at convincing humans because ALL our systems are vulnerable to be subverted that way.
Just wait for the deepfakes to utterly destroy video as a means of common representation of reality when it crosses the threshold of too often faked to be generally believed without independent attestation.
And even then people will question subconsciously.
Headline says "fingerprinting"
If it's public information exposed through a browser and uniquely provides a bit of info, it's good for fingerprinting.
End of line.
Which is not fingerprinting.
> Headline says "fingerprinting"
Which is obvious clickbait.
Learn the terms.
The forest for the tree here
_Any_ website can tell whether or not you have TeamViewer installed. Ad networks could theoretically target you based on whether or not you have TeamViewer installed.
I’m not assuming malice, but it’s a much bigger privacy hole than just increasing fingerprinting by a few bits.
In this case, I think it IS malice. The font encodes way more data that you'd expect.
Assuming malice from corporations should be the default in today's society.
Sometimes it is the case that no one behind the decisions is being malicious - e.g., perhaps just trying to accomplish a task at hand on a tight timeline.
As such, the default in today's society, where we are more or less 'on our own' on this issue, should be to assume that even while that vehicle over there is indeed about to plow into the crowd, there is often no one behind the wheel.
We should default to an even more suspicious approach.
We must assume malice and push back on the invasion of our rights.
Besides, the constant negativity is just exhausting for all involved. I'm glad intellectual curiosity won out on this thread, at least for now.
Every single bit doubles the value so 1 bit could still be a lot.
Teamviewer versions are not backwards-compatible
> It would be totally sufficient to use the protocol handler
The error when it's not installed could be confusing to the user. Remember this is a remote support product, you must the assume the user is not tech literate. You must also assume the user is on IE5 or something.
Honestly if this could only be detected from a TeamViewer-owned domains it would be basically a non-issue. The more concerning bit is that this can be used to build a cross-site fingerprint.
GDPR is concerned with all personal data processing, cookie or not is even more irrelevant to it applying.
Per-site font lists don't seem to be a common feature in browsers nor extensions, however.
The invitation url looks like this (where XXXXXXXX is the session code).
The website will check if a teamviewer font is installed (using javascript). If the font is found, the web site assumes that teamviewer is installed. The teamviewer installer also registers a protocol handler in the operating system. The website (javascript code) will thus try to launch teamviewer directly using a url like the following: Otherwise, if the font is not found, it will prompt the user to download and install the teamviewer application.Source: Font detection routine:
Connect routine: