We are leaving our digital footprints all over the Internet every day and now we may be leaving our fingerprints as well.
Since the clampdown on tracking of cookies a few years ago, the scramble has been on for advertisers to find new ways to track your every move online. They have apparently found one.
It is called "canvas fingerprinting" and, like cookies, it essentially allows third parties to track the websites you visit and exactly when you visit them. Perhaps most interesting about canvas fingerprinting is the fact it doesn't actually place files on your PC, finding a nice loophole in the legislation against cookies.
Tech expert Matthew Sparkes explains how the tech works, saying "Canvas fingerprinting works by asking your browser to draw a small image on your screen when you visit a website. Certain unique characteristics of your browser and computer mean that this image is drawn in an near-unique way that can be used to identify you."
As you'd expect, online privacy advocates are more than a little concerned over the technology.
A team of researchers from the University of California actually began tracking the canvas fingerprinting as far back as 2012 and found it to be a very clever means to silently track the web sites users visit.
"The tracking mechanisms we study are advanced in that they are hard to control, hard to detect and resilient to blocking or removing," the researchers wrote in the paper. "Canvas fingerprinting uses the browser's Canvas API to draw invisible images and extract a persistent, long-term fingerprint without the user's knowledge."
Regarding the very sticky issue of online privacy, the researchers added, "A frequent argument in online privacy debates is that individuals should take control of their own privacy online [but] our results suggest that even sophisticated users may not be able to do so without significant trade-offs."
In a recent study done by Princeton University and KU Lueven University in Belgium, researchers there discovered that 5.5 percent of the top 100,000 sites are already using canvas fingerprinting.
Of those, Sparkes adds, "The vast majority (95 per cent) were using code from AddThis -- a company which provides social media sharing widgets. On many sites they provide the buttons which allow you to quickly share links via Facebook or Twitter. This gives them a large foothold across many parts of the web -- it reaches 1.6 billion different Internet users every month, across 14 million domain names."
