https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/technology/personaltech/fingerprinting-track-devices-what-to-do.html
https://archive.is/kyIEj
https://archive.is/kyIEj
If there’s one lesson to learn about digital privacy, it’s that we can never grow complacent. Even if we secure our data so we are not tracked online, the ad tech industry will find ways to monitor our digital activities.
And so it is with the rise of so-called fingerprinting, which security researchers are calling a next-generation tracking technology.
What is it exactly? Fingerprinting involves looking at the many characteristics of your mobile device or computer, like the screen resolution, operating system and model, and triangulating this information to pinpoint and follow you as you browse the web and use apps. Once enough device characteristics are known, the theory goes, the data can be assembled into a profile that helps identify you the way a fingerprint would.
And here’s the bad news: The technique happens invisibly in the background in apps and websites. That makes it tougher to detect and combat than its predecessor, the web cookie, which was a tracker stored on our devices. The solutions to blocking fingerprinting are also limited.
Security researchers discovered fingerprinting as a tracking method about seven years ago, but it was rarely discussed until recently. Only about 3.5 percent of the most popular websites use it today for tracking, but that’s up from about 1.6 percent in 2016, according to Mozilla. And an unknown number of mobile apps also use fingerprinting.
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