>- Firefox sends some dummy data when making use of privacy.resistFingerprinting, and so you should get a unique fingerprint _every time_ you visit a site, so the fact alone that you're unique might potentially not matter if you're _differently_ unique every time you visit the site. Is there a flaw in this line of thinking?

Yes, because those randomized results can be detected, and that can be incorporated into your fingerprint. Think of a site that asks you about your birthday. If you put in obviously false answers like "February 31, 1901", a smart implementation could just round those answers off to "lies about birthday" rather than taking them at face value.

>- My understanding is that the primary utility of browser fingerprinting is for advertising / tracking. In other words, the bulk of the population an advertiser would actually care about would be the huge middle of the bell curve on Chrome using Windows, not the privacy nuts on Linux with a custom browser config. In other words, if "blending in with the crowd" really worked I would think that tracking companies would fail against the most important and largest part of the user pool. If anything, it's more important to target grandma as she will actually click on ads and buy stuff online compulsively.

The problem is all this fingerprinting/profiling machinery ends up building a profile on privacy conscious people, even if they're impossible to sell to. That can later be exploited if the data gets leaked, or the government demands it. "I'm not a normie so nobody would want to show ads to me" doesn't address this.

Advertisers try to reidentify and match you against their database, the less information you give them and the more randomized it is, the less certain they can be, its you again.

If i use my locked down firefox with a VPN where potentially a hand full other brills like me come out on the other end, i am not concerned about them building a profile of me.