Canvas fingerprinting is tracking you, and you don't even know what it is

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Slavi
Posts: 15
Joined: Mon May 04, 2015 10:47 am

Canvas fingerprinting is tracking you, and you don't even know what it is

Post by Slavi »

Popular, heavily trafficked websites are increasingly turning to “canvas fingerprinting” in order to track your online movements. Canvas fingerprinting is extremely hard to block, hard to detect, and has become a unique identifier that logs your ‘Net history as you jump from site to site without you knowing about it — on desktop and mobile devices.

Adam Kujawa, the head of intelligence at Malwarebytes, said canvas fingerprinting is a step above cookies and is exceptionally complex.

“Canvas fingerprinting is the act of extracting information from a user’s browser and using it paint a semi-unique identifiable token. The method requires the use of HTML5, which is a commonly used standard today, being used from making web apps to games,” Kujawa said.

“By utilizing the built-in canvas features of HTML5 and requesting various operations being made –out of the view of the user — by the browsers instance of HTML5, identifiable information can be extracted.”

Researchers from Belgium’s Ku Leuven University and Princeton University here in the States recently released their report on the tracking tool that comes from a little-known software company in Virginia called AddThis and several others firms, including Canadian-based dating site Plentyoffish.com.

The AddThis homepage blares: “Get more traffic with beautifully simple website tools.” (Disclosure: VentureBeat used AddThis in the past, although the tool is not in use on our site now.)

According to the researchers, canvas fingerprinting is in use on over 5,000 of the world’s most trafficked websites, including the White House, porn sites, and others. The researchers of the report put it this way:

“By crawling the homepages of the top 100,000 sites we found that more than 5.5 percent of the crawled sites include canvas fingerprinting scripts. Although the overwhelming majority (95 percent) of the scripts belong to a single provider (addthis.com), we discovered a total of 20 canvas fingerprinting provider domains, active on 5,542 of the top 100,000 sites.”

http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/30/canva ... hat-it-is/

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/w ... acy-policy
lylejk
Posts: 94
Joined: Thu Feb 20, 2014 1:07 pm

Re: Canvas fingerprinting is tracking you, and you don't even know what it is

Post by lylejk »

I use Chameleon; not perfect, but it at least tells me what fingerprinting is going on and appears to be blocking a lot of them. I even have to disable it sometimes since websites won't work unless I do so; sad. Most sites that do this still work perfectly fine with Chameleon. :)

https://github.com/ghostwords/chameleon
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