It helps businesses in their data collection processes by preventing scrapers from being detected. With each connection request to a website, you make your device information available to the target website. Your browser sends a connection request to the target web server when you click on the link to visit the ecommerce website. Then, the web server will gain access to a small piece of data on your device, such as ip address, browser type, user agent, and much more. In this case, your user agent will inform the web server that you are making a connection request from your mobile phone using safari. The website will display its content based on the user agent information provided.

However, the widespread use of fingerprinting for targeted advertising and tracking people’s online movement raises legal problems. Across europe regulators have been calling for a clampdown on cookie banners, which appear on websites asking people if they give their permission to be tracked. The banners are so ubiquitous (and frustrating) that people largely click accept and don’t understand how they are agreeing to be tracked—that’s leaving aside the fact that many cookie banners may not even do what they claim. Banks use it for fraud detection, to determine if an account is being accessed by an unfamiliar device. Two-factor authenticators  use it to flag users that may be impersonating someone else to get past security. One application for the current work, in fact, is to provide another tool for validating someone’s identity.

Like all technological advances, browser and device fingerprinting can be used for good or ill, and they are undeniably a useful tool in the fight against banking, credit card, and e-commerce fraud. This is because the more they know about you, the better they can target ads at you. They are therefore very keen on tracking your activities on the internet to build up a detailed model of your likes, dislikes, hobbies, and more, based on your web browsing history. It is also important for companies to be able to delete a user’s data upon request, in accordance with the right to be forgotten. This means organizations must have a system in place to quickly and securely delete user data, including browser fingerprinting data, when requested by the user. Browser fingerprinting is a complex issue with no one-size-fits-all solution.

To do that, they need to be able to tell when the same browser on the same device visits different websites. This month at the ieee symposium on security and privacy, ibm researchers outlined a new fingerprinting technique that uses style features — things like the fonts stored on your browser — to infer a user’s identity. The work was led by a former ibm intern, xu lin, as a phd student at the university of illinois, chicago, in collaboration with ibm researchers fred araujo, teryl taylor, and jiyong jang, as well  as illinois’s jason polakis. Browser vendors know that users do not like being tracked, and are continually implementing features to limit fingerprinting

Browser fingerprinting (also called device fingerprinting or online fingerprinting) refers to tracking techniques that websites use to collect information about you. Modern website functions require the use of scripts — sets of instructions that tell your browser what to do. Webgl fingerprinting technique, like canvas fingerprinting, is used to expose information about devices’ graphics drivers and screen resolution by forcing browsers to render an image or text. This technique distinguishes users based on their graphics drivers and screen resolution, and creates unique fingerprinting.

This information may include technical details about the device, software, and network, as well as user-specific information such as language preferences, time zone, and browsing history. Each property could be a part of browser fingeprint and used with standart one 防关联浏览器 like resolution and plugins list in order to identify user with even more precision. Site can identify user hardware even if there is no possibility to do that directly by using special "Tricks". Unlike other solutions which block potentionally dangerous methods, fingerprintswitcher protects users by replacing results of theese apis, adding noise or transfering values from real devices. Service provides access to database with about 50,000 fingerprints obtained from real devices which is constantly updated. 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.