What’s remarkable is that fingerprinting is able to extract this information simply by querying what is in the browser. The authors of that open source code say there are working on gathering other metrics that advertisers use, such as information about your camera. These metrics are available in the fingerprinting JavaScript code, shown below. To be specific, fingerprinting uses these metrics:
As long as you are using the same device and browser, every time you visit a web site that uses fingerprinting, that website knows who you are-with approximately 95% to 99.5% accuracy. Because this algorithm uses the same calculation every time, it will provide the same value (number) every time.
The fingerprint takes all that data, turns it into numbers, sums it, and then runs a calculation over it to yield a single value. Other information can be stolen in clever ways that researchers have discovered. Much of this information is contained in the browser. It shocks me that the techniques of spy agencies have gone mainstream.Ī fingerprint is a number that is calculated from information about your computer, some of it the user perhaps thinks might be private.
Now, advertisers are using these same techniques. I first heard about fingerprinting in The Washington Post, when Edward Snowden said, in the information he gave to journalists, that the NSA was using the screen resolution of computers to identify terrorists and others. Who is most vulnerable to fingerprinting?ĭoes this approach work for all browsers and operating systems? Different companies have developed browser plug-ins to block fingerprinting, and one open-source project has given away their code, which shows how fingerprinting works-and we’ll explain in this article. This tracking is such a shocking invasion of privacy that I feel compelled to explain it and how you can block it. Fingerprinting is a tracking technique that advertisers and companies use.
0 kommentar(er)
