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I'm a bit old school when it comes to browser tracking, and as such I'm not as familiar with Canvas. What exactly is Canvas? What information is provided which
by everdrive 8y ago
I'm a bit old school when it comes to browser tracking, and as such I'm not as familiar with Canvas. What exactly is Canvas? What information is provided which can be tracked? Are there ways to disable Canvas without installing browser extensions?
- kalleboo 8y agoThe Wikipedia page has a pretty good summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_fingerprinting Basically Canvas is a JavaScript API for programmatically drawing graphics and text. Subtle differences in color, font rendering, antialiasing etc will produce different rendering on different hardware depending on OS, browser, GPU, drivers, etc. This lets a site running JavaScript to generate a hash unique to everyone with your specific combination of software and hardware and uniquely identify you without cookies.
- matthewaveryusa 8y agoBasically different devices and browsers render high-level graphical objects, such as fonts, differently. When you visit a site that does canvas tracking, a small javascript snippet will ask your browser to render a few graphical things on an html5 canvas and export that canvas to a png. The hash of that png is a good fingerprint of your hardware, browser and rendering software.
- rubidium 8y agoJust to be clear, the only reason to do this is fingerprinting, correct?
- dillondoyle 8y agowhich has legitimate use cases in fraud detection and login security (eg recaptcha)
- mindslight 8y agoIt's a bit of a stretch to cast those as "legitimate use". A security vulnerability is a security vulnerability, regardless of who exploits it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]