Comment Remote screening (Score 1) 57
The problem is the leak is very hard to plug. Sites legitimately need to know your screen dimensions for stuff like layout.
I've often wondered if remote screening would put an end to this.
Imagine a paid service where the company serves as your window into the internet and composes your HTML and sends it to you as an image displayed by their app. You could magnify or smallify the image as needed, and the app would send mouse and keyboard events back to the company to be forwarded on your behalf.
It's not a fully formed idea, you would also need to package and send audio, deal with credit card payments, and so on, but for people with fast internet access this might be a doable solution.
(Of note: it's like a VPN, but the HTML compositing on the remote computer is an additional layer. A VPN service could randomize the output portal per session, but that's already a feature of VPNs.)
An advantage of this is that almost all the system configuration fingerprinting would be inaccessible to the wider world, if a breech happens none of your private files are available on the remote computer to be stolen, and a number of security guardrails could be implemented, such as ensuring that mouse events are short, keypress events contain only keypress information, only image information is displayed, and so on
A sophisticated client system might even incorporate multiple user identities per client user, keyed to a specific website. Your internet facing information could be different when visiting Amazon.com, as compared to WalMart.com.
VPNs aren't that expensive, and they're used by people who want the value of an extra level of security.
For most web browsing, this might be an extra level of anonymity for people who would value that extra level.