Your web browsing habits may be less private than you think

The user-agent string is a rich source of entropy for fingerprinting, of course, and to mitigate that fingerprintability, browser manufacturers have either already frozen the user-agent header or are working towards doing so. [newline]this is another example of changing the data that an api provides without necessarily removing the api entirely. Sending a blank user-agent header would break countless websites which assume that it is present. So in general, what browsers are doing

This helps inform how to process audio – but no audio is recorded, collected, or played, so you don’t need microphone and speaker access. And yet, this technique can inform fingerprinting with multiple parameters and values. It also generates data such as the font size or active background color setting, which come into play when creating a unique user id for tracking. Quietly assessing the unique configuration of web browsers that connect to a web domain is a process called device fingerprinting. Naturally, the fingerprint being scrutinized is made up of more than simply the web browsing program, such as the installed languages, operating system, plugins, and in-browser time zone, among others. When dealing with fraud, take note that only a small number of your site  visitors are responsible for fraudulent activities.

Asking the user's permission (and therefore alerting the user that they're being used, or allowing the user to deny them by default). A passive technique is one which uses data that's already been given to the website, often because historically,

However, their use does nothing to hide the more detailed information covered earlier in this article. In a similar way that canvas fingerprinting uses html canvas to measure how a device renders an image, audio fingerprinting uses the web audio api to measure how a device produces sound. Aside from recording top-level configurations such as software versions, extensions, cookie settings, and languages, to name a few, there are additional more intricate fingerprinting techniques that can be used. Some examples of these are below – and the more of these that are used together, the more accurate the fingerprint will be. Cross-browser 指纹浏览器 fingerprinting allows sites to track users across multiple browsers, and it is also more accurate than single-browser fingerprinting.

Entries are also grouped by used method and sorted by a parameter called danger level. For example, on previous page you can see, that canvas fingerprinting was performed 4 times and it has danger level 8, browser user agent was obtained 10 times and it has only 2 danger level. Site have created 7 fonts, which is not dangerous and therefore fingerprintdetector assigned only 3 danger level to that entry. Combine enough of these details and it’s often possible to build a fingerprint which is unique to your device. “the most promising approach that is also built into browsers nowadays is the approach of the tor browser,” pugliese says. To prevent fingerprinting, tor tries to standardize all the parts of its browser so everyone appears to have the same fingerprint.

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.

Advanced browser fingerprinting versions can provide even more data on the machine, mostly through accessing html5 canvas and requesting some measure of graphics processing. Employing html5 canvas can reveal the  operating system, browser, and gpu of a machine. Due to slight differences in how gpus render images, device-specific details might be acquired.