1345965 - font fingerprinting protection not enabled

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1336208

(Firefox :: Security, defect)

Description

[wckronholm]

Attachment: Font results after upgrading to FF52

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170303012758

Steps to reproduce:

I checked for font fingerprinting via EFF's Panopticlick (https://panopticlick.eff.org/), first using FF51, then upgrading to FF52. I am on Ubuntu 64 bit 16.04.


Actual results:

The results are the same for me before and after: many, many fonts listed contributing to a unique fingerprint.

Same results with a fresh profile.


Expected results:

I expected the results to be a very short list of fonts, similar to the results obtained for a Tor browser.

Others report that after upgrading to FF52, the list of fonts is very restricted, but that is not the case for me.

Comment 1

[wckronholm]

I just tried the same thing in a Private Browsing window, and I get a very short list of fonts there.

Comment 2

[YF (Yang)]

bug 1336208, or in http://www.ghacks.net/2016/12/28/firefox-52-better-font-fingerprinting-protection/: You need to do the following to use a system font whitelist in Firefox: ...

Comment 3

[wckronholm]

Did the following:

    Type about:config in the browser's address bar and hit the Enter-key afterwards.
    Confirm that you will be careful if the warning prompt is displayed.
    Right-click in the main pane listing all preferences, and select New > String from the context menu.
    Name the new parameter font.system.whitelist.
    Now add fonts to the whitelist separated by comma: Helvetica, Courier, Verdana is a valid value for instance.

But instead of Helvetica, etc, I entered Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3, which is the same result I get with Tor browser.

I checked on Panopticlick again, no change.
I cleared cookies for the eff site as well. No change. The instructions in your link have no effect for me.