Nearly 25% of Alexa’s top 10,000 sites deploy browser fingerprint scripts
A browser fingerprint script is a piece of JavaScript code that runs inside a web page and works by testing for the presence of certain browser features.
Browser fingerprints are now commonly used by online advertisers as the next generation of user tracking mechanisms. Advertisers create one or more “fingerprints” for each user by running different types of fingerprint operations, and use these “fingerprints” to track users as they visit other sites on the Internet.
Giant Elephant fingerprint browser
There is no doubt that this cooking by advertisers is a serious violation of user privacy, and Browser manufacturers including Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Brave and Tor Browser have already deployed features to detect and block these types of malicious code.
Earlier this month, a team of researchers from Mozilla and several universities analyzed how web operators are using popular browser fingerprint scripts today.
They developed it themselves using a machine learning kit called FP-Inspector, which scans and analyzes the 100, 000 most popular websites on the Internet based on Alexa web visits. According to research data, more than 10 percent of Alexa’s top 100,000 and 25 percent of Alexa’s top 10,000 websites have deployed browser fingerprints.
However, the team also points out that while browser fingerprinting is currently used by a large number of websites, not all scripts are used for tracking. Some fingerprint scripts are also used for fraud detection because automated robots tend to have the same or similar fingerprints, and fingerprint scripts are a reliable way to detect automated behavior.
So what does a browser fingerprint include? Browser fingerprints are a powerful monitoring tool that collects parameters about browser version and type, operating system, language, time zone, screen resolution, browser plug-ins, and more. Websites rely on these parameters, known as browser fingerprints, to identify users and track their specific behavior.
- In general the fingerprint
Including Cookie, Session, Evercookie, and Flash Cookies
- Basic fingerprint
Including hardware type (Apple), operating system (Mac OS), User Agent (User Agent), system font, language, screen resolution, browser plug-in (Flash)
Silverlight, Java, etc), Browser extensions, Browser Settings (do-not-track, etc), time zone Offset (Browser GMT Offset) and many other information
- Senior fingerprint
Including Canvas fingerprint, AudioContext fingerprint, WebGL fingerprint and many other information
Including media device fingerprints, GPU plugins and Pepper 3D rendering
- Integrated fingerprint
WebRTC (Web Real-time Communication), including MediaStream,
RTCPeerConnection RTCDataChannel etc
How do I prevent browser fingerprint collection?
If you don’t have the expertise or change your browser information very frequently, you can almost 100% locate a user through your browser fingerprint. So we still need professional software such as Giant Elephant fingerprint browser to realize the camouflage of browser fingerprint.