1879151 - (fpdata) [meta] Collect hardware characteristics to inform engineering choices in anti-fingerprinting

Status: NEW

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

Description

[Tom Ritter [:tjr]]

After the first iteration of Fingerprinting Protection, we would like to continue the momentum and protect more users more comprehensively. However, of the many things we could do (put gamepads behind a permission prompt? normalize timezone names? ship missing fonts to users via remote settings? spoof outer window dimension to inner dimension? software rendering in canvas? etc etc etc) - we don't actually know which will have the most impact on how unique people appear to a fingerprinter. Nor do we have any way to know how much of an impact we have made.

This bug is a meta for tracking a telemetry effort to collect users' hardware characteristics (technically some software characteristics also) so we can see how unique users actually are, and what makes them unique. With this data we can choose engineering tasks that will have the most impact on real world users by making fewer users unique or moving users into larger buckets. This Google Doc goes into more detail about the need for this collection, why other options are insufficient, and what guardrails we will include.