Thursday 24 July 2014

Canvas Fingerprinting

This sure is a scary way to track what ones upto in the online world.


"When you visit a website that employs Canvas Fingerprinting, as the new sneaky system is known, the site sends your web browser a request to generate a hidden image consisting of some text. Because individual computers have operating system versions, browsers, fonts, graphics adapters, etc. that vary from one to another, there are slight variations between the way text appears in an image on one computer from the way it does on the next. The images of text, are, therefore, like computers’ fingerprints; by analyzing them and tracking what type of image a particular computer generates, different websites utilizing the same tracking system can track a user from site to site – even if he or she is using Incognito Mode, strict browser privacy settings, or an anti-tracking tool."


Still not sure if its the 1*1 pixilation thingie that the email marketing companies use for tracking. However, their tracking is still cookie based, from what I am given to understand.


Real scary. And the very fact that there might be more methods makes one pause.


Mmh, more here

No comments:

Post a Comment