mwheelz

This is a real version of the critique and I've been thinking about it. The page leans on an IP-to-geo lookup that's known to be approximate (city-level on a good day, region-level often, wrong-city sometimes); accuracy isn't the point, any location, given without asking, is the point. But you're right that leading with a wrong answer gives readers permission to dismiss the whole. Considering opening with timezone instead and demoting geo to later, where it lands as "we tried, here's how close we got." Open to better suggestions.

Fair point, and you're right. On iOS the stock font set is essentially uniform across devices in the same OS version, so the "nearly unique" claim doesn't hold there. Just pushed a hedge: prose now distinguishes between desktop (where fonts accumulate via apps and OS over time, and the bundle is genuinely identifying) and iOS/Android (where it isn't, on its own). Combined with screen + GPU + language + timezone the iOS version still narrows the field, but the prose shouldn't overclaim. Thanks.

Thanks for that. The page isn't trying to tell anyone something they don't already know, it's trying to put it in front of the people who haven't been told. The bug reports today have been gold and the volume is meaningfully better for them.

Yeah, the bottom counter on the page is meant to make exactly that point. Mouse movements, scroll velocity, tab switches, reading pauses are all features in modern fraud / "trust" scoring systems alongside the static fingerprint. Biometrics is the next layer, and it's already happening on the back of "passive" liveness detection most people never see.

Confirmed. Firefox's privacy hardening returns "Mozilla, or similar" or just "Mozilla" as the renderer string. Chrome doesn't (yet). My parser was treating the Firefox string as if it were ANGLE format and grabbing the wrong half. Fixed.

Right, IP-to-geo is approximate and gets a lot of cases wrong (yours among them). Most ad networks use it as a region/DMA hint, and not precise positioning. The point of including it isn't precision. It's that any location is more than nothing, and the visitor never opted in.

Pedantic but right. The JS queries them; the browser returns them without prompting the user. "Volunteered" is the editorial verb for that round-trip but it does paper over a layer.