Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought - Bitestring's Blog

I've known about fingerprinting browsers for a while, but I wasn't aware of how effective it was.

But companies found another way to uniquely identify you across different sessions and websites without using cookies or other persistent storage. It’s called web fingerprinting. Fingerprinting is a more sophisticated approach to identify a user among millions of others. It works by studying your web browser and hardware configuration. Many websites use a fingerprinting library to generate a unique ID. This library collects data from multiple JavaScript APIs offered by your web browser. For example, websites can see web browser version, number of CPUs on your device, screen size, number of touchpoints, video/audio codecs, operating system and many other details that you would not want a typical news website to see.

All of these values are combined to generate a unique ID. Surprisingly, each user’s device and browser specifications differ so much that they get a unique ID among millions.

I tried this myself and it matched me even with 1Blocker, clearing cookies, and using private browsing windows. The author was only able to defeat fingerprinting in Firefox after specifically enabling it with "privacy.resistFingerprinting = true".

Fingerprinting is particularly difficult since the only way to fight it is for the browser itself to do it. You cannot work around it any other way.

It is amazing how hard we have to work to maintain any privacy online.