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
