Account creation, fingerprinting, and Android phones vs Browsers

[bobbyfilet69]

I went down a whole path of trying to automate account creation on Reddit, but ran into a problem where accounts were getting banned randomly. I was using a browser to do this (not headless, mobile proxies, selenium). I also specifically got into a lot of anti-fingerprinting, but it wasn't good enough I guess.

I never really explored automating an Android phone.. is that a better choice to circumvent fingerprinting? Or does an android phone have just as much of a problem?

 

[kavo]

Do you target Reddit specifically or just want to know more about automation in general?
Mostly these bans are due to misconfiguration of your browser/device, not fingerprint. Not only on Reddit, but also Google, Facebook and any other website that cares.

If you were using original chromedriver that was downloaded from chromium.org, then you had navigator.webdriver property set to true, and that's an instant ban.
Then, if you were using undetected-chromedriver (search Google for that), websites might not like the fact that your browser is bare chromium. Mostly they trust Google Chrome.
These two steps could be solved by using an antidetect browser.
Also, if you click on elements with selenium and do not emulate mouse movements, you would also get banned on many platforms.

So, you would need to:
1. Get undetected-chromedriver
2. Emulate mouse movements
3. Get good Google Chrome fingerprints.

 

[bobbyfilet69]

Do you target Reddit specifically or just want to know more about automation in general?
Mostly these bans are due to misconfiguration of your browser/device, not fingerprint. Not only on Reddit, but also Google, Facebook and any other website that cares.

I do believe I’ve used undetected-chromedriver before. So when you say mid configuration of browser/device, do you mean when I’ve modified user agent and something in the fingerprint doesn’t match up with the user agent?

When you say antidetect browser, are you saying there’s a browser that has all of this built in? The big problem I ran into was how complicated fingerprints are, and how many parameters you can mismatch/make unrealistic.

 

[kavo]

Well, basically, fingerprints could be divided into two parts: one that does not depend on your browser + OS combo, e.g. CPU cores, RAM, Canvas, WebGL and that type of stuff.
And there is another part: the one that depends only on browser + OS + maybe CPU architecture combination, and that one is the same across all the devices with the same browser, OS and CPU arch.
You can visit creepjs (Google it) with your setup and get a look at that red hell if you want to see how many parameters are involved in this second part and how many mismatches you've got

you saying there’s a browser that has all of this built in

There are like tons of them. Check Marketplace - Misc. Also use the search feature for discussions about them

 

[Tony888]

I went down a whole path of trying to automate account creation on Reddit, but ran into a problem where accounts were getting banned randomly. I was using a browser to do this (not headless, mobile proxies, selenium). I also specifically got into a lot of anti-fingerprinting, but it wasn't good enough I guess.

I never really explored automating an Android phone.. is that a better choice to circumvent fingerprinting? Or does an android phone have just as much of a problem?

Hello, I also am a developer trying to figure this out. Did same thing as you did. Did you manage to do any progress?

 

[IcaroAugusto]

I went down a whole path of trying to automate account creation on Reddit, but ran into a problem where accounts were getting banned randomly. I was using a browser to do this (not headless, mobile proxies, selenium). I also specifically got into a lot of anti-fingerprinting, but it wasn't good enough I guess.

I never really explored automating an Android phone.. is that a better choice to circumvent fingerprinting? Or does an android phone have just as much of a problem?

For automating it on an android phone you will need to get around the fact that the reddit apk uniquely identifies the phones it's running on each request. You will need to either reverse engineer the requests or patch the apk. Automating a browser might be easier, although reddit is using datadome now to detect bots, last I checked.