The original post: /r/privacy by /u/nidostan on 2024-11-11 02:33:57.

This is something that I’ve been wondering for a long time but because of another current thread about someone’s browser fingerprinter I thought it was time to ask it now.

My understanding of hashes is that if you change the input by a tiny amount it can change the output completely. So 10000000000000000000001 has a completely different hash than 10000000000000000000000.

With that in mind, if someone changed some arbitrary value like screen resolution by one pixel would that give a completely different hash? And if this is the case then shouldn’t browser fingerprinting be very easy to thwart by addons that do that?

Or is there a way using probabilistic attribution which advertisers also do, that they can say that user’s record was so close to a another record that they are likely the same person?