There is a technique that web pages use called fingerprinting, and that we have already mentioned on occasion. This technique collects information from browser that the user uses, as well as their computer (the characteristics of your hardware), and the the way you navigate By the web.
Tracking a user across multiple browsers is now possible
Until now, these tracking techniques have been limited to a single browser, being a common option to use several browsers to avoid that the footprint that we leave on that website cannot be associated with the same user. This changes with the creation of researchers who have developed a new system that allows this task to be carried out. through different browsers.
In addition to inventing it, they have created a web page so that we can check the system. The page is called Unique Machine and it works on any device that uses JavaScript. If we click on “Get My Fingerprint”, the process will start. After 20 seconds, the scan will finish and give us the footprint of our browser and our computer (the latter is still in the development phase and may give bugs).
If we click on the details that the website has analyzed, we will see that it collects the following information:
- Time zone.
- Number of CPU cores.
- Writing fonts.
- How many speakers do we have.
- Screen aspect ratio and resolution.
- WebGL.
- Ad blocking.
- HTML5 Canvas (for drawing graphics and animations on a web page via JavaScript)
- Cookies enabled.
- Coding.
- GPU (our graphics card)
- Hashes of the GPU render results, unique and generated as a result of a GPU calculation.
- Idiom.
- Plugins installed in the browser.
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They discover that it is possible to track mobile phones through WiFi anywhere Claudio Valero November 4, 2016 • 14:11
Is fingerprinting bad?
The point this page tries to demonstrate is that if you do the same test in another browser, the result should be the same. The researchers found that the system achieved identify users 99.2% of the time, with a somewhat small sample of 1903 users and 3615 fingerprints. The source code for the system can be found on its home page. GitHub.
Fingerprinting is not bad per se, since there are services that use it like Google on a computer that we use frequently so as not to have to be doing the identification in two steps every time we log into our account, or what Our bank online detects if we are accessing it from where we normally do, or if we enter the password at the same speed as we normally do. Other companies often use the system to offer personalized ads, and with the system they have developed in Unique Machine, this can be done regardless of the browser used.
The only way to avoid this is use Tor (without installing any plugin, as that can help identify the user), or NoScript in Firefox. Some pages even reproduce invaluable sounds through the speakers, which in turn are recorded by the microphone, so 100% anonymous browsing would require disconnect the microphone. The researchers say that another good method is to use a virtual machine.
