- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
Transcript
Screenshot of a pop-up. It reads:
Color Inaccuracies Detected.
We have detected that your browser may have issues with color accuracy.
You may notice subtle visual noise and incorrect colors appear in your skins.
This issue is usually caused by anti-fingerprinting privacy settings in your browser.
Learn how to fix [with a hyperlink to a help page]
this screenshot was taken on Miners Need Cooler Shoes
does anyone know what would cause this precisely? why would anti-fingerprinting mess with the colors i use to edit an image in the browser?
i’d be tempted to brush this off as the website being malicious and lying to get me to deactivate fingerprinting protection, but the website is fully open-source and what they describe happened to me on Piskel (a pixel art editor, which would constantly mess up my colors in subtle but annoying ways)
fingerprinting mechanisms use pixel coloring to help fingerprint you. browsers have implementations that fuzz pixel colors to prevent this fingerprinting often in imperceptible manner. Think shifting pixel alpha values by a random +/- 0.3 values; range was arbitrarily chosen for demonstration purposes.
as in, fingerprinting mechanisms use the colors that are in my OS’s color picker? or is it other colors?
Every computer will generate different colors due to driver/os/hardware differences when rendering anything. these differences are often imperceptible to the eye by easily grabbed via browser apis. by randomizing the results just a tad it defeats the trackers.
oh i see, thank you!
np, i wouldnt worry about it for this website just leave your settings alone until you personally notice an issue. and even then…
If you want to visualize it, this is a cool website to see it
deleted by creator
it is not affected by the display, and this does not mean it tries to fingerprint the user. it only just means that it uses the canvas API for whatever reasons
Ok, but how does changing the colour of pixels help identify me?
Is it for tracking the source of screenshots?
It’s a two part process. One part happens on your machine. The browser is given a fingerprint to shift colors, and then the trackers can identify you even in a screenshot.