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• Are You Paying More Because Your Digital Fingerprint Says So?

  Sales March 24, 2025

  As you browse online, do prices seem to fluctuate when searching from different locations or devices? This phenomenon is not just a coincidence; it’s the result of companies tracking your digital fingerprint. In this article, we’ll delve into what exactly happens and how CloakID can help protect against these practices.

  When websites collect information about you through cookies, browser type, screen resolution, language preferences (and many more), they create an individualized profile known as a “digital footprint.” This unique identifier makes it easier for companies to tailor prices based on your behavior. Some examples include:

  [1] Booking.com charging higher rates in Pakistan than the US

  [2] Target’s app price increasing when you’re near one of their stores

  These practices might seem innocuous, but they demonstrate how businesses use digital fingerprints as a formative part of personalizing services and setting prices.

  Sources

  [1] Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany and University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands An Empirical Study on Price Differentiation Based on System Fingerprints By Thomas Hupperich, Dennis Tatang Dec 8 2017 Full PDF or Summary via Semantics Scholar

  [2] Harvard Business Review How Retailers Use Personalized Prices to Test What You’re Willing to Pay By Rafi Mohammed October 20, 2017

  [3] Pro Publica The Tiger Mom Tax: Asians Are Nearly Twice as Likely to Get a Higher Price from Princeton Review By Julia Angwin, Surya Mattu and Jeff Larson Sept. 1, 2015

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• Thank you!

  Sales March 22, 2025

  
  Thank you for your subscription!
  

  If you have not installed the CloakID plugin download it from Firefox store
  here

  Once installed, open the extension and enable it, then continue browsing.

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• Get started with CloakID

  Tech March 21, 2025

  Starting with cloak ID is as easy as adding a plug-in to your browser

  
  Download our plug-in from the browser store.
  Start browsing.
  Get Started

  
  Your browsing will resume automatically with the protection to the original site you were visiting

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• Fingerprint tracking

  Tech March 20, 2025

  Most of the people are aware of browser cookies. Browser fingerprinting is the second-generation technic for tracking your behaviors in internet. While Cookies are regulated and there are a lot of options to control them, browser fingerprinting is not regulated and done without consent.

  Your fingerprint is a combination of all the small lines on your skin. Combining them in a pattern makes the fingerprint unique. Digital fingerprint is a sum of all specific parameters of your browser, hardware and operating system. Similar to the fingerprint combination of all parameter uniqueness contributes to narrowing down the set of users with the same settings. Browser fingerprinting is extremely effective as found by some researchers.

  What are the implications

  Browser fingerprinting is just another tool to identify and track people as they browse the web. There are many different entities – both corporate and government – that are monitoring internet activity, and they all have different reasons for doing so. Advertisers and marketers find this technique useful to acquire more data on users, which in turn leads to more advertising revenue. Some websites use browser fingerprinting to detect potential fraud, such as banks or dating websites, so it’s not always nefarious. Surveillance agencies could also use this to identify people who are employing other privacy measures to cloak their IP address and location, such as with VPN Tracking your site visits, preferences, behavior can be used to categorize your preferences and biases. Then marketeers and promoters can bid for add placement in real time or use this information to power AI agents, price optimization and promotion techniques.

  Will you be fine with traders knowing your weak points and price limits?

  Why this matters

  You are not the one making the choice:

  • content is prioritized by an algorithm fitting your profile
  • prices are maximized
  • search results are ordered based on promotion
  • content is filtered based on algorithms or country

  Do you want to check your fingerprint and how recognizable you are?

  Two websites that reveal browser data and also assess a “uniqueness” score based on your variables in comparison to their database of browsers.

  • amiunique.org is open source and provides more information and updated fingerprinting techniques, including webGL and canvas.
  • Cover Your Tracks is run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

  Cover Your Tracks is the updated version of a project the EFF has been working on for many years. It gives you a pretty good picture of how susceptible your browser is to finger printing.

  How to protect

  You can protect yourself with a combination of tools:

  • Browser selection Firefox, Opera, Brave (avoid Chrome and Edge) with correct settings;
  • Browser plugins: NoScript (to block JavaScript) or Ghostery (tracker and ad blocker protection);
  • VPN and HTTPS proxy
  • Tor Browser

  CloakID can do all of the above in one click replacing the complicated set of tools and services.

  source: Wikipedia

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• How does CloakID works?

  Tech March 20, 2025

  How does Cloak ID work?

  

  1. Browser request is forwarded by the plug-in to CloakID service.
  2. Request headers are inspected and modified to decrease uniqueness of your system, balancing for usability*.
  3. Request is sent to the target site from EU based service or via a different location proxy.
  4. Site response is scanned for fingerprinting scripts and cookie requests.
  5. Common fingerprints are used as response to scripts where applicable.
  6. Cleared from fingerprint scripts response is sent to your browser.

  Additional preventive features

  • Your sites to be excluded list - out of the box
  • Block of requests responses to known add trackers - optional component
  • Age content filtering - future
  • Parent/guardian block list - future
  • Block/Deny custom lists - future
  • AV or malware protection service - future

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• Data security and privacy

  Sales Tips March 10, 2025

  CloakID does not store your personal browsing data. This is a foundational principle of the service design.

  How does it work then?

  Your browsing request is handled in memory only in a separate service session. If connection is interrupted or closed data is lost. You need to initiate the request to continue browsing

  How can I be sure?

  Source code will be published as open source for review. In the meantime we are working with consultancy to audit the code.

  Everybody collects data today. What data is collected?

  We collect anonymous aggregate statistical information for ALL sessions. User ID is not used. Purpose is to improve the service and optimize digital fingerprints. What we collect:

  • Total number of failed web UI frameworks
  • Total number of failed requests per site
  • Average request Processing time

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• Google’s Surprising Update Tracks All Your Devices

  Marketing March 09, 2025

  The need for user information is growing driven AI adoption. AI needs data for both training and to operate efficiently in the right user context. Recently Google went against its own advise and openly gave “its advertisers the go-ahead to use digital fingerprinting to uniquely identify internet users and track their actions across the web.” This does not mean that it was not done until now, it is just becoming valid method for Google. In the light of the waning cookie replacement initiative, there are not that many options left. The cookie replacement initiative had one challenge - it was not fixing the issue, it barley isolated cookies from other trackers, by expecting to use your login instead of them. As result Google can securely follow you everywhere.

  

  Most expect some form of global prompt for the tracking to impact the ad industry as users ask not to be tracked, but it is not clear how it will be implemented and what will be the impact at that stage. For users with Google accounts used in browsing that is not relevant anyway as they are tracked already

  Original article

  source: Forbes

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• What information is revealing but required for usability?

  Tech April 04, 2024

  Security and usability are opposite work in progress

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