Browser Fingerprinting: An Introduction and the Challenges Ahead
I did a little bit of research on browser fingerprinting years ago and even tried to write my own library to do it and ever since, I've always questioned how useful it actually is.<p>Using the list of measurement points on <a href="https://amiunique.org" rel="nofollow">https://amiunique.org</a> as guide most of the things that are constant about my computer like platform, browser, or requested language are not really unique to me and are shared by a large percentage of the other users who have come to the site.<p>On the other hand, most of the data points that are unique to my machine change semi-frequently. User agent and version change on browser updates, timezone changes when I travel, screen size and resolution change when I plug into my external monitor, new fonts will slowly be installed over time, and even things like how the canvases are rendered can change slightly depending on how much strain my GPU is under at the time I get fingerprinted.<p>Just plugging in to my external monitor was enough to get amiunique to treat me as a different user. (if you want to try, be sure to clear your local storage and cookies in between visits as the site saves a uuid there and will serve you your previous results if it finds it).<p>I'm sure there's some magic formula that gives different weights to different data points that can give a decent guess at who you are, but I doubt it can say with 100% accuracy that you are who it thinks you are.<p>It seems to me all it would take to defeat fingerprinting is a browser extension that modifies the browser apis to randomly slightly alter the requested data (add a random font to the list, add some nonsense to the user agent, etc). Sure, the fingerprint would still be unique, but it would be unique on every visit which would defeat the ability to track a user across visits.<p>*I'm not an expert on this subject at all, so if I got something wrong, please correct me