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It's not just about design. For instance there is Canvas and WebGL for interactive content. Different GPU's draw things slightly differently. Someone creates a
by dkarras 7y ago
It's not just about design. For instance there is Canvas and WebGL for interactive content. Different GPU's draw things slightly differently. Someone creates a canvas in the background, draws stuff, reads it back and since your machine has a particular way of drawing things (because of GPU design, drivers, different browser implementations of the painting stack) you can be tracked. Same goes for audio capabilities. If you don't want multimedia, then fine, it is slightly easier. Then the server can probably try to track you with your upload / download speed, ping etc. They can tax your cpu to see how fast it is. Then they get your browser width / height. Combine them and you can be tracked pretty accurately. There are countless avenues for fingerprinting.
- skybrian 7y agoWell, sure, but at the hardware level, more standardization is possible too. If you have a popular model of computer and it's the same as everyone else's computer, it's hard to get much out of identifying it. This is kind of what Apple does by offering a limited number of models. Another approach would be to use standardized VPN's that hide client machine differences. There are downsides, of course. I'm not sure people care about fingerprinting enough to do all that.