In recent years, the issue of personal data and its collection has often arisen following leaks and cases such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Often referred to as the primary instruments of abusive data collection, third-party cookies aren’t the only way advertisers can target you. Fingerprinting, although less known, is also insidious in its tracking.
You will also be interested
Fingerprinting is the process by which a remote site or service collects small pieces of information about a user’s device and puts it together to form a unique profile, or “digital fingerprint”, of the user’s device. The two main forms of footprint are that of the Navigatorwhere this information is provided by the browser when a user visits sites, and device fingerprint, where information is provided by the apps that the user has installed on his device.
An increasingly common practice
In most cases fingerprinting is done by a third party rather than directly by the site the user is visiting or the application they are using. When a person uses their device, a specific third-party tracker may be loaded across multiple installed apps or visited sites. This allows this company to track an individual through their use of multiple sites they visit or apps they have installed. These trackers have unprecedented insight into a user’s daily activities, giving them information that is often precise enough to know what a user is doing at any given time and even where they are using their device.
It doesn’t matter if you activate the private navigationthat you erase the Cookies third party or you use a virtual private network. Ironically, some even use the fact that you have activated data protection options in your browser to take your fingerprints.
Counter fingerprinting
There are many tools that attempt to break fingerprint persistence in the browser. Some attempt to randomize the results of certain characteristics, such as the fingerprint of theAudioContext. This can be an effective method of breaking persistence, but it is important to note that a tracker may be able to determine that a randomizer is being used, which itself may be a feature of footprint. Careful consideration needs to be given to how effective randomization of footprint features will or will not be in combating stalkers.
Tor nodes
Browsers can also combat fingerprinting by making all instances of the browser look the same. By making fingerprinting characteristics the same across all instances of browsers, a particular instance cannot be uniquely identified. This is the method adopted by the Tor anonymity tool.
It’s very effective against fingerprints when done right. Tor Browser identified dozens of places where work needed to be done to make all browsers look the same across all features. This is important because it is easy for a user, who changes individual settings with the intent to ward off trackers, to actually make their browser easier for trackers to identify.
Anti-tracking tools
Finally, a tool can draw up a list of trackers and block them directly. This is the method employed by many browser add-ons or extensions, such as Privacy Badger of the EFF. By blocking trackers, these tools are able to prevent most fingerprint trackers from loading in the browser. Third-party trackers, which make up the majority of those that use fingerprinting to identify users, are unable to identify users’ browsers.
Interested in what you just read?