About
What is Chameleon?
Chameleon is a Mozilla Firefox addon that spoofs your browser profile and includes a few privacy enhancing options. It is the spiritual successor to the popular addon Random Agent Spoofer.
What is a browser fingerprint?
Every time you visit a page on the Internet, your web browser reveals several pieces of information to the website you're visiting. Ads and trackers can follow you across the web by creating a unique ID from your browser fingerprint. A browser fingerprint is a collection of data that may include some of the following items below:
- IP (Internet Protocol) Address An IP address is a string of numbers that are like a street address for the Internet. For example, 74.125.65.91 is an IP address that belongs to Google. A website can use these numbers to get a rough estimate of your geographic location.
- User Agent A user agent is a string of text that lets a website know what device is making a request. For example, Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; SM-T580) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.157 Safari/537.36 is a user agent that tells a website that the page is being loaded from a "Samsung Galaxy Tab A" tablet running Chrome 74 on Android 8.1. A website can use this to redirect you to a mobile version of their site.
- Fonts Windows, macOS, Android, etc are bundled with different fonts. A website can check to see which fonts are installed on your computer. This information can contribute to a fingerprint that may be used to identify devices and people in a shared location.
- Screen Resolution Your device/monitor screen data leaks the screen resolution that you're using and if you're using multiple monitors. This information can contribute to a fingerprint that may be used to identify devices and people in a shared location.
Why is Chameleon not available for Chrome/Chrome-based browsers?
Chameleon uses some features that are only available in Firefox. If you care about your privacy you should not use Google Chrome. If you can, please use Firefox or Safari as your primary browser. Yes, there are some websites that only work in Chrome. Fortunately, there are Chrome-based alternatives that you can use: Brave and Ungoogled Chromium.
Is Chameleon enough to protect my privacy online?
No.
There are several other Firefox extensions that you should use in addition to
Chameleon and privacy practices you should follow.
For a list of recommened extensions, check the Recommended Extensions page.
Does Chameleon make me anonymous online?
No.
Spoofing your browser profile does not make you anonymous online.
In case you're wondering, "private" windows do not make you anonymous either.
Chameleon's purpose is to minimize the effectiveness of tracking on the web. If you're worried about
alphabet agencies, you should be using Tor Browser.