Re: [whatwg] Proposal: navigator.cores

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier@gmail.com> wrote:

> I thought that those concerns were addressed with the addition of a maximum
>
number of cores?
>

That doesn't address much, if anything.


> > Also, WebKit's implementation also caps the number of cores at eight
> > to mitigate some of the finger printing / privacy concerns raised.
>

This is a misunderstanding of what fingerprinting is.  It's not about
having rare values, like the one user in a thousand with 32 cores.  (That
matters too, but it's not the main issue.)  Fingerprinting is having data
that persists for the user at all, such as whether a user has one or two or
four cores, which are then combined with as many other data points as
possible to create a fingerprint.  Limiting the maximum exposed number of
cores doesn't affect this.

-- 
Glenn Maynard

Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2014 17:54:49 UTC