[QUOTE=Original703;7400324]I'm behind the times when it comes to promoting my own online privacy. Maybe others are, too?
I use a VPN and Chrome when connecting to hobby-related sites. Based on your notes below, I inferred that my digital fingerprint, via my surfing habits or my hardware or both, is exposed. If I switch to Tor or Firefox, it's less easy for others to fingerprint my machine / connection, right? Ought I still use a VPN or does the Tor network address that?
[/QUOTE]VPN has no impact on browser fingerprinting. I don't use TOR browser so you'd have to look into it but knowing what it is I'd imaging the anti-fingerprinting is strong with that one. Tor is also how you get to the dark net. I'm using Brave but I haven't looked into whether or not it's still good with fingerprinting in a long time. Guess I need to do a little research.
VPN is merely hiding your IP behind another IP. It encrypts all your traffic between your computer (or router) and the remote VPN node which strips off that layer of encryption and then sends your original traffic out from it, making the world think you're at that location vs where you actually are. This is how you can appear to be in other countries with a VPN.
Fingerprinting happens when you load a website and they have a bunch of scripts that run in the background that look at your machine and system and create a unique signature for that device that it sends back to the site. This happens irrespective of VPN as it's at the level of the direct link between your browser and the webserver. It acts as a unique identifier so you can't trick a site by creating a new account or coming at it from a new IP.
