I usually use Tor Browser to scan files online for viruses, which I then send to Windows users (I use Linux) if they are clean.
Lately, I’ve noticed that the User Agent in TOR is showing up as Linux, when it used to show up as Windows.
Is this a problem with my system or a change made by the TOR team? The fact that Linux has far fewer users increases fingerprinting.
Does it increase fingerprinting? I imagine there might be some non-user-agent way to determine the OS. Like with image handling or whatever.
It’s probably more unique and suspicious for a linux browser to pretend to be Windows than a Linux system disclosing itself as Linux.
Pretty sure the TOR user agent is just default firefox, by design. It’s very easy to detect OS with very rudimentary fingerprinting techniques, a lot of which are blocked by the TOR browser but they can never get them all.
I’d expect TOR browser to mitigate this. Canvas2D is disabled for instance and system fonts aren’t exposed.
Most other things could be mitigated by making every platform use the same code paths for e.g. font rendering. It should be pretty damn hard to determine which OS it is when the userspace is the same. I don’t know whether TOR browser currently does this though.