1816389 - Add random noises to the AudioBuffer to prevent AudioContext fingerprinting

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Privacy: Anti-Tracking, task)

Description

[Tim Huang[:timhuang]]

Adding random noises to AudioBuffer to prevent AudioContext fingerprinting. We should cover the following two APIs.

• AudioBuffer.getChannelData()
• AudioBuffer.copyFromChannel()

Comment 1

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Due to the influence content can have on the data in AudioBuffer, the best that a moderate level of random noise could hope to achieve would be to defeat currently active fingerprinting scripts until the scripts were tweaked to amplify the signal over the noise.

The fdlibm changes proposed in bug 1358149 would have sustained benefits, which may be sufficient to remove any benefit from noise.

Comment 2

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Hey Tim, we're thinking this should be resolved wontfix as it won't be effective long term. Similarly Bug 1816381 - Add random noises to the AnalyserNode to prevent AudioContext Fingerprinting is the same.

Comment 3

[Tim Huang[:timhuang]]

We agreed that we don't need audio context randomization and will rely on bug 1369149 to table audio context fingerprinting.

Comment 4

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Working around noise in Safari is discussed at https://fingerprint.com/blog/bypassing-safari-17-audio-fingerprinting-protection/

Perhaps the authors chose MacBook Air 2020 and MacBook Pro 2015 for the different results from arm and intel processors.