Hello. I want to be interested in a topic that I know almost nothing about. I want to hide my device data on the Internet, not just my location data. I was advised that the VPN solution is to change the MAC address. together. This is true? If I choose a good VPN, they cannot identify me, but if devices are registered, e.g. do you not reveal my identity or exact situation because of the guarantee or in other places/ways?
Browser fingerprinting is incredibly complex. Attempting to defeat it usually makes your traffic stand out as abnormal, which draws more attention than a normal user.
Basically, be careful - you’ll Streisand Effect yourself.
Your MAC address doesn’t escape your local network, so there’s no value in trying to spoof that. Nothing in the Internet has any idea what your computer or phone’s MAC address is.
Any wide-area tracking based on a cellphone’s MAC address is getting into the realm of state actors, at which point they can just track you through your service provider anyway.
MAC address already isn’t passed through your router, it’s only seen by things running on your computer or on your local network.
What do you mean by “device data?” Do you just not want someone to identify that you’re using the same device across multiple sessions? Or do you want to hide all details about your device? (i.e. not letting a website know your OS, screen resolution, browser type, etc).
Thanks for the explanation, the picture is starting to clear. Changing the MAC address is not absolutely necessary. Can choosing and using a good VPN hide the data I mentioned? I think only if I don’t intentionally provide them somewhere, say in the form of a cookie or data sheet.
I mean the latter. Because every device has a unique serial number, right? Any network that can connect to it will also receive a MAC address. But if I, for example, register my motherboard somewhere, even if I change the MAC address, the other device identifiers will fail, right? But is VPN a solution for this?
Good fingerprinting will still defeat the combination of VPN use and private browsing sessions.
You don’t need to keep a cookie for fingerprinting to track you with a reasonable degree of confidence, as it’s a script that runs in your browser, observes the quirks of your setup, and phones them home immediately. All the actual data lives server-side, not on your device. Preventing this requires disabling JavaScript, which breaks most of the modern web.
VPNs are mostly ineffective for preventing sophisticated tracking. They’ll protect you against plaintext DNS observation on a public network, but you can prevent that anyway by enabling DoH instead of paying for a VPN. They’re most useful on an actively hostile network, but that’s not a situation you’re likely to ever experience as a normal person.
Going through a VPN doesn’t change most browser identification methods.
So maybe a combination of a good VPN and HTTPS can help me in this matter? I don’t want to disable Javascript either. But I’m interested in this browser theme, I’ll take a closer look. In any case, I don’t want to expose hardware data. Such as e.g. Steam or GOG also collects (CPU, motherboard, GPU and even their unique identifiers). But this is just an example, the point is that I don’t want to release these either, even if I have to forget the quick login because of it, or something like that.
Windscribe has plethora of options to change info to reduce the likelihood of browser fingerprinting.
Options to randomly change user agent, time zone, gps spoofing (for mobile), MAC spoofing, random traffic generation and a few others.
But none of that has to do with the VPN part, that’s the browser hackery
It’s a VPN plug in for browsers, supplied by a VPN provider.
It’s an anti fingerprinting plugin for browsers, that also does a VPN separately if you want.
The one browser plug in does anti finger printing, plus routing of Web traffic over a VPN. You can also install an app on the pc that gives you more options than the browser plugin.