Websites Are Tracking You Via Browser Fingerprinting
Websites Are Tracking You Via Browser Fingerprinting
New research provides first evidence of the use of browser fingerprints for online tracking.
Headline should read "Websites have been tracking you by browser fingerprinting for a while. Google publicly doing it for 6 months."
Test your footprint: https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/
How effective is the TOR browser against CreepJS?
100%. They all look the same.
Really bad headline. The actual article is about a study showing that browser fingerprinting is being used in real time in pricing target ads to your browser.
To investigate whether websites are using fingerprinting data to track people, the researchers had to go beyond simply scanning websites for the presence of fingerprinting code. They developed a measurement framework called FPTrace, which assesses fingerprinting-based user tracking by analyzing how ad systems respond to changes in browser fingerprints. This approach is based on the insight that if browser fingerprinting influences tracking, altering fingerprints should affect advertiser bidding — where ad space is sold in real time based on the profile of the person viewing the website — and HTTP records — records of communication between a server and a browser.
“This kind of analysis lets us go beyond the surface,” said co-author Jimmy Dani, Saxena’s doctoral student. “We were able to detect not just the presence of fingerprinting, but whether it was being used to identify and target users — which is much harder to prove.”
The researchers found that tracking occurred even when users cleared or deleted cookies. The results showed notable differences in bid values and a decrease in HTTP records and syncing events when fingerprints were changed, suggesting an impact on targeting and tracking.
Additionally, some of these sites linked fingerprinting behavior to backend bidding processes — meaning fingerprint-based profiles were being used in real time, likely to tailor responses to users or pass along identifiers to third parties.
I have never been able to figure out how to block fingerprinting without entirely disabling my browser and it looks like the race to the bottom is accelerating
This isn't new. Reddit is infamous for this too
i mean, yeah?
the cookies you accept, the addons you have, hell, even the size of your monitor when you maximalise the window is a part of your browser fingerprint
anyone who's ever downloaded the Tor browser will know it. that browser screams at you if you try to maximalise or install addons exactly because of that
Mullvad has a fork of Firefox they built with TOR (the organization, it does not route over TOR network). Includes NoScript and ublock origin and works by making all browsers the same ( so long as you don’t fsck with it).
You don’t have to use it with their VPN but that’s good, too.
My only complaint is it doesn’t support containers. Otherwise it’s wonderful.
+1. Mullvad browser is the best when it comes to browse the clearnet (not Tor). Also, if anyone reading this, do not compile Mullvad browser yourself, only use the official binary from the Mullvad site (or the -bin variant if you use Arch Linux AUR) since from my testing, different compiled versions of Mullvad browsers come with different fingerprints.
Using an optimized build from CachyOS and using it on CreepJS will give you a low amount of visits, same goes with the Flatpak build, but the binary from the Mullvad site gives around 2k views, which means that at least 2k people have the exact same fingerprint as you, but of course, it counts the people that have visited CreepJS to test their fingerprint. There is also fingerprint.com which seems to be wayyy more advanced.
They were doing this a decade ago, to help track app marketing campaigns.
IIRC, it turned out you could get pretty close to uniquely identifying a device with permutations on only 7 attributes. The problem is if you install a plugin to return false data, it could break non-malicious websites, like running games or data visualizations.
Am I misunderstanding something? Wouldn't that just be 7! = 5040 possibilities?
They have been for years.
This is why I use Firefox + Canvasblocker + ublock origin I try to disable Javascript if it isn't required for functionality for the stuff am doing or I trust the site (using noscript)
Noscript on my personal machines
Marketers are a pox
If you’re a marketer, fuck you get a real job.
No shit
Lets you question how digital stalking is still allowed?
I heard about a browser extension that could spoof fingerprints.
Canvasblocker?
Yes thank you
I really wish there was a foolproof way of preventing fingerprinting. Disabling JavaScript unfortunately isn't really an option, no-one builds websites with progressive enhancement in mind these days.
JShelter and uBO medium mode to the rescue. Pair that with Librewolf and you're pretty secure against fingerprinting.
Thanks for recommending JShelter! I'll add it to my list
The more people disable JS, the more websites won’t require it.
It's just unrealistic to expect any size of the population to even understand what JS is, much less understand why and how it's problematic and even beyond that, how to disable it, and even further to expect them to walk away from the 90%+ of sites using it on the web.
Same you can try noscript but its not very effective from blocking fingerprinting from what I know
Soooo, how do I access the full article? I have to pay? Lol