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| provenance:privacy:fingerprinting [2026/08/12 09:31] – Create provenance page for privacy:fingerprinting: queries, denominators, the fold ageing from 5 to 59 unmapped tuples and every string's new home, two report-script bugs, quote verification, and the 4,322 -> 5,859 refresh diff. Partly reconstructed; mark karel.kubicek.claude | provenance:privacy:fingerprinting [2026/08/12 10:07] (current) – Add section 10: the Fable review pass, the windowed-guard defect it exposed (29 corpus figures stale outside the audited heading window across six pages), the hardened check_page_numbers.mjs, and the page-specific fixes. Authored by Claude. karel.kubicek.claude |
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| * **Whether the 103 technique-only exclusions are all correctly excluded.** The rule is defensible and it has never been audited paper by paper. | * **Whether the 103 technique-only exclusions are all correctly excluded.** The rule is defensible and it has never been audited paper by paper. |
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| ===== 9. Run log ===== | ===== 10. Review pass, 2026-08-12 ===== |
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| | //Recorded.// The refresh was reviewed by a second model (Claude Fable 5), told explicitly that the summary it was given might not be exhaustive, with instructions to hunt stale numbers. It found a **systematic defect, not a scatter of typos**, and it is worth stating because it will recur on the next refresh: |
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| | * ''check_page_numbers.mjs'' was run with a **heading window** — normally ''Use in Publications'' to the next section — so it audited only the corpus section. Every corpus figure repeated in a page's **intro, tooling section, recommendations, footnotes, Related Pages or an embedded code block** was outside the window and stayed at its 4,322-corpus value. Across the six pages **29 such figures** survived the first pass. |
| | * The matcher was **substring**, not word-boundary, so ''report.includes('59')'' was satisfied by ''11.59 bits''. One genuinely stale figure sat inside a checked window and passed for that reason. |
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| | Both are fixed in ''scripts/check_page_numbers.mjs'': matching is now anchored with lookarounds, ISO dates and URLs are stripped before scanning, ''--code'' opts into scanning ''<file>'' blocks, and omitting the heading markers checks the whole page. **Run it windowed //and// whole-page.** The whole-page run is noisy — a page's non-corpus half is full of figures quoted from other papers — so read its output rather than expecting it to exit clean. |
| | This page's content page was the worst affected — **twelve** stale figures outside the corpus section, including the opening ''<WRAP important>'' box, which is the first thing a reader sees and said ''201 / 59 / 71'' against a corpus section saying ''280 / 83 / 105''. Also fixed: OpenWPM **12 → 15**, Tracker Radar Collector **3 → 6** (it contradicted the page's own tool table), FingerprintJS **9 → 14**, ''puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth'' **1 → 2**, legal **7 of 59 → 10 of 83**, and two Related-Pages shares. |
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| | **Two claims were not stale but false, and had to be re-derived rather than renumbered.** Both are recorded here because they go beyond the mechanical brief: |
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| | - The //Defences// section said "the corpus behind this page ends in 2024 — so **there is currently no peer-reviewed measurement in these seven venues of the post-reversal web**", of Google's 16 February 2025 fingerprinting-policy change. The corpus now contains 18 browser-FP papers from 2025–2026, and **Luo et al. (IMC 2025)** crawled the Tranco top 20K **in May 2025**, three months after the change. Verified against ''2025/IMC/canvassing-the-fingerprinters…/paper.cols.txt'': //"We performed the crawls in May 2025 using a UCSD IP address"// and //"canvas fingerprinting is relatively modest, found in 12.7% of popular and 9.9% of tail sites"// (the paper also gives the count directly: //"2,067 (12.7%) of them extracted at least one fingerprintable canvas"//). The claim was replaced with the measurement; the open question was narrowed to the pre/post comparison, which still does not exist. |
| | - The open question "no study quantifies how much a headless or containerised crawler under-counts fingerprinting" is **partly answered** by **Annamalai et al. (TheWebConf 2025)**, verified against ''2025/WWW/beyond-the-crawl…'': //"471 such fingerprinting websites, out of which the automated crawl missed 211 (45%)"//. Narrowed rather than deleted: the paper attributes the gap to interaction depth, authentication and consent rather than to headless-vs-headful specifically, which is what the open question actually asks. |
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| | Both papers were added to [[literature:bibliography]] as ''luo2025_canvassing'' and ''annamalai2025_beyond'' (duplicate-key check first, cache purged, keys confirmed rendering). |
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| | ===== 11. Run log ===== |
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| ^ ^ ^ | ^ ^ ^ |
| | Caveats deleted | "IEEE S&P is only 43% retrieved (paywall)" — 780 of 780 selected papers are now retrieved. "2010–2024". | | | Caveats deleted | "IEEE S&P is only 43% retrieved (paywall)" — 780 of 780 selected papers are now retrieved. "2010–2024". | |
| | Mistake caught in review | The first edit to ''fp_fold.mjs'' put an unescaped ''/'' inside a regex literal (''ar/vr''), which made the whole module fail to parse. The script threw immediately, which is the good failure mode; the bad one would have been a pattern that silently never matched. | | | Mistake caught in review | The first edit to ''fp_fold.mjs'' put an unescaped ''/'' inside a regex literal (''ar/vr''), which made the whole module fail to parse. The script threw immediately, which is the good failure mode; the bad one would have been a pattern that silently never matched. | |
| | | Review | Reviewed by Claude Fable 5 on 2026-08-12 with the instruction that the summary might not be exhaustive. It found the windowed-guard defect in §10 and 12 stale figures on this page plus two claims that had become false. All fixes were applied and re-saved the same day. | |
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| [[privacy:fingerprinting|← back to the content page]] · [[literature:corpus|corpus-level provenance]] | [[privacy:fingerprinting|← back to the content page]] · [[literature:corpus|corpus-level provenance]] |
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