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The Quiet Way Advertisers Are Tracking Your Browsing
Cookies are on the way out—but not enough is being done about browser fingerprinting. So what is it?

Creepy cookies that track all your online activity are (slowly) being eradicated. In recent years major web browsers, including Safari and Firefox, have restricted the practice. Even Chrome has realized that cookies present a privacy nightmare. But stopping them ends only one kind of online tracking—others are arguably worse.

Fingerprinting, which involves gathering detailed information about your browser’s or your phone’s settings, falls into this category. The tracking method is largely hidden, there’s not much you can do to stop it, and regulators have done little to limit how companies use it to follow you around the internet.

What Is Fingerprinting?

By combining all this information into a fingerprint, it’s possible for advertisers to recognize you as you move from one website to the next. Multiple studies looking at fingerprinting have found that around 80 to 90 percent of browser fingerprints are unique. Fingerprinting is often done by advertising technology companies that insert their code onto websites. Fingerprinting code—which comes in the form of a variety of scripts, such as the FingerprintJS library—is deployed by dozens of ad tech firms to collect data about your online activity. Sometimes websites that have fingerprinting scripts on them don’t even know about it. And the companies are often opaque and unclear in the ways they track you.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/static/browser-uniqueness.pdf
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01285470v2/document
https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs
https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protection/blob/master/descriptions.md
https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-online-tracking-device-that-is-virtually-impossible-to-block

Fingerprinting evolved alongside the development of web browsers and is intertwined with the web’s history. As browsers have matured they have communicated more with servers—through APIs and HTTP headers—about people’s device settings, says Bielova, who has studied the development of fingerprinting. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) first identified fingerprinting back in 2010. Since then fingerprinting has become increasingly common as advertisers have tried to get around cookie blocks and limits put on ad tracking by Google and Apple.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/static/browser-uniqueness.pdf

So How Bad Is It?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-quarter-of-the-alexa-top-10k-websites-are-using-browser-fingerprinting-scripts/
https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/popets-2020-0041
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-use-gpu-fingerprinting-to-track-users-online/
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss2017/ndss-2017-programme/cross-browser-fingerprinting-os-and-hardware-level-features/

How Can You Stop It?
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3308558.3313703
https://www.wired.com/story/privacy-browsers-duckduckgo-ghostery-brave/
https://blog.torproject.org/browser-fingerprinting-introduction-and-challenges-ahead/
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/01/07/firefox-72-fingerprinting/
https://brave.com/privacy-updates/4-fingerprinting-defenses-2.0/

Analyze and evaluate your site with web browsing tools. Inform your clients and educate them about conditions. Transparency is the best policy. Keep clients updated and aware of developments. A good place to start is to subscribe to the podcast where I track developments such as this.

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Mick Smith, Consultant M: (619) 227.3118

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