Privacy decrypted #8: what are browser and device fingerprinting?

Like all technological advances, browser and device fingerprinting can be used for good or ill, and they are undeniably a useful tool in the fight against banking, credit card, and e-commerce fraud. This is because the more they know about you, the better they can target ads at you. They are therefore very keen on tracking your activities on the internet to build up a detailed model of your likes, dislikes, hobbies, and more, based on your web browsing history. It is also important for companies to be able to delete a user’s data upon request, in accordance with the right to be forgotten. This means organizations must have a system in place to quickly and securely delete user data, including browser fingerprinting data, when requested by the user. Browser fingerprinting is a complex issue with no one-size-fits-all solution.

Browser fingerprinting (also called device fingerprinting or online fingerprinting) refers to tracking techniques that websites use to collect information about you. Modern website functions require the use of scripts — sets of instructions that tell your browser what to do. Webgl fingerprinting technique, like canvas fingerprinting, is used to expose information about devices’ graphics drivers and screen resolution by forcing browsers to render an image or text. This technique distinguishes users based on their graphics drivers and screen resolution, and creates unique fingerprinting.

It helps businesses in their data 指纹浏览器 collection processes by preventing scrapers from being detected. With each connection request to a website, you make your device information available to the target website. Your browser sends a connection request to the target web server when you click on the link to visit the ecommerce website. Then, the web server will gain access to a small piece of data on your device, such as ip address, browser type, user agent, and much more. In this case, your user agent will inform the web server that you are making a connection request from your mobile phone using safari. The website will display its content based on the user agent information provided.

To do that, they need to be able to tell when the same browser on the same device visits different websites. This month at the ieee symposium on security and privacy, ibm researchers outlined a new fingerprinting technique that uses style features — things like the fonts stored on your browser — to infer a user’s identity. The work was led by a former ibm intern, xu lin, as a phd student at the university of illinois, chicago, in collaboration with ibm researchers fred araujo, teryl taylor, and jiyong jang, as well as illinois’s jason polakis. Browser vendors know that users do  not like being tracked, and are continually implementing features to limit fingerprinting

Similar technologies include webgl tracking (more graphics trickery) and audiocontext, where a tracker plays a tiny sound sample and measures the results. None of these will necessarily identify you precisely, but put enough of them together and it's likely you'll have a unique (and very trackable) browser fingerprint. The problem is websites don't just see you as 'a visitor using chrome.' some well-chosen javascripts allow them to detect a host of details about your system, and these make you far more identifiable. The exact configuration of lines and swirls that make up your fingerprints are thought to be unique to you. Similarly, your browser fingerprint is a set of information that’s collected from your phone or laptop each time you use it that advertisers can eventually link back to you.