Hello. I want to be interested in a topic that I know almost nothing about. I want to hide my device data on the Internet, not just my location data. I was advised that the VPN solution is to change the MAC address. together. This is true? If I choose a good VPN, they cannot identify me, but if devices are registered, e.g. do you not reveal my identity or exact situation because of the guarantee or in other places/ways?
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MAC address already isn’t passed through your router, it’s only seen by things running on your computer or on your local network.
Browser fingerprinting is incredibly complex. Attempting to defeat it usually makes your traffic stand out as abnormal, which draws more attention than a normal user.
Basically, be careful - you’ll Streisand Effect yourself.
Your MAC address doesn’t escape your local network, so there’s no value in trying to spoof that. Nothing in the Internet has any idea what your computer or phone’s MAC address is.
Any wide-area tracking based on a cellphone’s MAC address is getting into the realm of state actors, at which point they can just track you through your service provider anyway.
Thanks for the explanation, the picture is starting to clear. Changing the MAC address is not absolutely necessary. Can choosing and using a good VPN hide the data I mentioned? I think only if I don’t intentionally provide them somewhere, say in the form of a cookie or data sheet.
Good fingerprinting will still defeat the combination of VPN use and private browsing sessions.
You don’t need to keep a cookie for fingerprinting to track you with a reasonable degree of confidence, as it’s a script that runs in your browser, observes the quirks of your setup, and phones them home immediately. All the actual data lives server-side, not on your device. Preventing this requires disabling JavaScript, which breaks most of the modern web.
VPNs are mostly ineffective for preventing sophisticated tracking. They’ll protect you against plaintext DNS observation on a public network, but you can prevent that anyway by enabling DoH instead of paying for a VPN. They’re most useful on an actively hostile network, but that’s not a situation you’re likely to ever experience as a normal person.
So maybe a combination of a good VPN and HTTPS can help me in this matter? I don’t want to disable Javascript either. But I’m interested in this browser theme, I’ll take a closer look. In any case, I don’t want to expose hardware data. Such as e.g. Steam or GOG also collects (CPU, motherboard, GPU and even their unique identifiers). But this is just an example, the point is that I don’t want to release these either, even if I have to forget the quick login because of it, or something like that.