The Quiet Way Advertisers Are Tracking Your Browsing

The exact configuration of lines and swirls that make up your fingerprints are thought to be unique to you. Similarly, your browser fingerprint is a set of information that’s collected from your phone or laptop each time you use it that advertisers can eventually link back to you.

By combining this information, it’s possible for advertisers to recognise you as you move from one website to the next. Multiple studies have found that around 80-90 % of browser fingerprints are unique. Fingerprinting is often done by advertising technology companies that insert their code onto websites.

While there’s little transparency around the companies that run fingerprinting scripts, the practice is verifiably widespread across the web. Many of the websites you visit will fingerprint your device; research from 2020 found a quarter of the world’s top 10,000 websites running fingerprinting scripts.

New ways of fingerprinting are being created too. For instance, earlier this year researchers proved they could create fingerprints of GPUs to identify people. Tracking people across different browsers is also possible.