Transcript

Screenshot of a pop-up. It reads:

Color Inaccuracies Detected.

We have detected that your browser may have issues with color accuracy.

You may notice subtle visual noise and incorrect colors appear in your skins.

This issue is usually caused by anti-fingerprinting privacy settings in your browser.

Learn how to fix [with a hyperlink to a help page]

this screenshot was taken on Miners Need Cooler Shoes

does anyone know what would cause this precisely? why would anti-fingerprinting mess with the colors i use to edit an image in the browser?

i’d be tempted to brush this off as the website being malicious and lying to get me to deactivate fingerprinting protection, but the website is fully open-source and what they describe happened to me on Piskel (a pixel art editor, which would constantly mess up my colors in subtle but annoying ways)

  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    502·
    13 days ago

    This sent me down a rabbit hole; interesting stuff.

    The way I’m understanding this: the way an image is rendered depends on lots of different factors like browser, OS, graphics card etc, plus other bits like fonts and anti-aliasing settings. Each persons set up is unique so an image rendering on that browser on that device will be unique. So to fingerprint and track someone, they get your browser to generate a reference image then extract the details of the created pixels from the memory and generate an MD5 hash which is then unique to your browser. That’s your fingerprint and every time a site generates the reference image it produces the same MD5 hash. That is then used to track you.

    So an anti-fingerprinting technique is to throw in a very subtle randomness to the colours generated in the image, which results in a unique MD5 each time the test is run making it useless for people tracking you (you are essentially a “new” browser every time a site tries to fingerprint you). So if you have #000000 for black, instead it may randomise to #000003 one time, and #002000 next. It’s a very subtle variance on the colours so won’t be readily perceptible but on images rendered and shown to you this would create very subtle noise. Hence the warning for a graphics tool; the makers are aware this effects how their tool works and are warning you incase you notice the results.