Fingerprinting

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A device fingerprint is a collection of information about a device's hardware and configuration. Unlike an IP address, which is a singular piece of data that users can manipulate for privacy and security (such as using a VPN service or resetting network connections), a device fingerprint holds a series of specified data that can be uniquely attributed to a device or user (or a group thereof), and are therefore much harder to protect from tracking and abuse of privacy.

How it works

Fingerprinting works by getting one or more data items and turning them into a much shorter bit string that uniquely identifies itself (typically by applying a hash-function). Such data points include device hardware, web browser, browser plugins and configuration, screen resolution, installed fonts, and many other methods. Even the lack of data can be used to build a fingerprint, as certain data is unlikely to be missing.

Because of the many different variables used to generate a fingerprint, adding extensions and changing settings intending to increase privacy may have the opposite effect.

Why it is a problem

While there are some benefits from a security perspective (e.g. trusted-device recognition and fraud prevention), fingerprinting allows websites to identify individuals even while masking their IP address, flagging privacy concerns and letting companies do things like targeted advertising, selling personal data and more. It also allows another avenue for tracking across websites as services implemented on many different sites on the web will be able to follow device browsing from one website to another.

Remedies

Device fingerprinting is difficult to avoid due to the aforementioned data points available. Notable remedies include using privacy-focused browsers such as Mullvad, Brave, or the Tor browser which either randomizes certain data points to hide unique attributes or modifies identifiers to make all users appear to be the same in an effort to reduce the uniqueness of the system (AKA spoofing).