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Cookies are on the way out—but not enough is being done about browser fingerprinting. So what is it?
CREEPY COOKIES THAT track all your online activity are (slowly) being eradicated. In recent years major web browsers, including Safari and Firefox, have restricted the practice. Even Chrome has realized that cookies present a privacy nightmare. But stopping them ends only one kind of online tracking—others are arguably worse.
Fingerprinting, which involves gathering detailed information about your browser’s or your phone’s settings, falls into this category. The tracking method is largely hidden, there’s not much you can do to stop it, and regulators have done little to limit how companies use it to follow you around the internet.
What Is Fingerprinting?
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.
“It takes information about your browser, your network, your device and combines it together to create a set of characteristics that is mostly unique to you,” says Tanvi Vyas, a principal engineer at Firefox. The data that makes up your fingerprint can include the language you use, keyboard layout, your timezone, whether you have cookies turned on, the version of the operating system your device runs, and much more.
By combining all this information into a fingerprint, it’s possible for advertisers to recognize you as you move from one website to the next. 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. And the companies are often opaque and unclear in the ways they track you.
