I built a cross-browser extension that controls fingerprinting surfaces
Hello Hacker News! I’m Tomasz, creator of Privacy Thing, a browser extension for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. I’ve just released its Preview version. Privacy Thing aims to reduce browser fingerprinting—the tracking of users without cookies. It began as an internal project: a simple location simulator. Over time, I expanded it to cover more fingerprinting surfaces. It now has 13 protection categories affecting 50+ browser APIs and methods: Geolocation, time and locale settings, Canvas, WebGL, Audio, Navigator, Screen, Client Hints, Battery, WebRTC, Dedicated Workers, Service Workers,…
In plain words
Privacy Thing is a browser extension for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers that reduces browser fingerprinting by masking tracking data across 50+ browser APIs. It covers 13 protection categories including geolocation, canvas, WebGL, audio, screen settings, and WebRTC. Users can configure global protection settings or create domain-specific rules with regional profiles to control how different websites see their browser information. The extension is fully customizable, allowing granular control over what data each site can access.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello Hacker News! I’m Tomasz, creator of Privacy Thing, a browser extension for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. I’ve just released its Preview version. Privacy Thing aims to reduce browser fingerprinting—the tracking of users without cookies. It began as an internal project: a simple location simulator. Over time, I expanded it to cover more fingerprinting surfaces. It now has 13 protection categories affecting 50+ browser APIs and methods: Geolocation, time and locale settings, Canvas, WebGL, Audio, Navigator, Screen, Client Hints, Battery, WebRTC, Dedicated Workers, Service Workers, and Shared Workers. The list is still growing. The extension is fully configurable. Users can create regional profiles and assign them to domain rules, with separate protection settings for each domain. Or they can skip domain rules and rely on the global configuration—I’m not here to decide what works best for them :-) Privacy Thing uses Manifest V3, with all its pros and cons. Chrome and Firefox appear to offer similar extension APIs, but differ fundamentally at the level where Privacy Thing operates. This matters because its scripts must load as early as possible to be effective. Its X-Ray module communicates with scripts running in the page context to show which APIs a site uses and how often it queries them. An aggregate count appears on the extension’s toolbar badge by default. Each release includes processed, compact datasets covering Chrome build numbers, supported language codes, language-to-country mappings, popular screen resolutions, and hardware configurations. This keeps the extension independent of external services and there is no good reason to build extra infrastructure for it. There are two exceptions. The regional preset wizard uses OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim geocoding service, but only after the user consents to sending the query. Maps are displayed using OpenFreeMap. Presets can also be created manually. Users who know the coordinates can enter them directly without contacting any 3rd-party service. The extension does not transmit telemetry or usage data. This makes development harder, but it is fundamental to its identity: user data belongs to the user. Privacy Thing configuration can be exported, edited and imported. The Preview is currently distributed under a proprietary license. This is not ideal; I ultimately intend to release the source under an open-source license, most likely the AGPL. More about the development process: https://tomaszjanusz.dev/en/projects/privacy-thing/ Download: - Mozilla Addons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-thing... - Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/privacy-thing-previ... The extension is STILL under review in the Microsoft Edge Add-ons store -_- Thank you for your suggestions and feedback. Please remember that this is still a preview: some things may not work, may be slower, or may not behave as intended. I sincerely hope such issues will be few and far between. P.S. Yes, Privacy Thing fully supports Firefox Containers. I like the concept and believe extensions should support containers whenever possible. Privacy Thing will support them elsewhere too, including Brave, if Brave Software makes its container API public.
More work this month
the category →
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Launched alongside, July 2026
the whole month →- IR
I might be the only SRE on Earth with his own bowling center. It's a more in-depth gig than you'd think. My family and I bought an abandoned 8-lane bowling center in the rural mid-west. In our small town there weren't many recreation options for families. You've heard of a food desert? This is an R&R desert. It had been abandoned for a good reason. The roof leaks, the electrical system was constantly surging, and my 70-year-old bowling equipment (still) doesn't work perfectly. The system that keeps your score is particularly interesting to me. It's the thing you watch during your game, but…
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- BA
Over the past few months, our team has been building more and more slidedecks using web frontend technologies with coding harnesses like Claude Code, but a common complaint is to make even small edits we need to edit the code either manually or via the harness. To avoid this loop, I ended up creating Bento, a single HTML file with everything you need in a slide tool including animations and shared editing. There's no install or cloud login, everything works offline. The default deck is around 560 KB and it doesn't need to fetch anything once you got it. Open it in a browser and then you can…
Dev tools · Jul 2026 · bento.page
- GG
A few days ago I found myself trying out GLM 5.2 and was really positively impressed. The capabilities and security I was getting from this LLM are similar to those I've gotten from models like Claude or GPT, and this really surprised me. But then I thought, "I wonder how it would work on a normal computer like mine," and above all, "I wonder if it would work without going into OOM on a computer like mine." So I started working with the help of agents to test this possibility. I started converting the model to int4, understanding MTP usage, and if possible implementing DSA for long context.…
AI · Jul 2026 · github.com
