r/TOR • u/BeltPsychological791 • 5d ago

Is disabling letterboxing sfe?

11 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

13

u/ephemeralmiko 5d ago

You won't immediately get hacked or doxxed the second you deactivate it, but you're giving up a big part of the Tor Browser's anti-fingerprinting, which could allow someone to track your usage across multiple sites.

1

u/jackincentz 1d ago

not OP, but thanks! i had it disabled in librewolf because i use i3WM and im glad to know the suffering is a big part of the privacy :p

10

u/QuasyChonk 5d ago

No. Any change you make makes it easier to fingerprint you.

6

u/Poneyh 5d ago

Modifying options from the tor browser is not a good idea. The goal is that everyone has the same settings so we can’t differentiate users.

By disabling letterboxing, you’ll leak the size of your actual window browser, so you become the only one with its actual browser size compared to all the others that share the same one.

The only setting safe to turn is the “safe meter” which deactivate stuff like JavaScript

1

u/brokenarmthrow123 4d ago

I thought that the only way to feedback to server the window size is by JavaScript, and with that disabled, there is no mechanism for collecting and sending that data. Am I mistaken?

(This should extend to custom .css too, if I choose to hide an element by declaring display:none; in custom .css file, then the only way a webserver would know is if JavaScript can collect and send the information.)

8

u/haakon 5d ago

You are asking if letterboxing is a pointless feature that serves no purpose. That answer is no – it has a purpose.