When visiting a website, your browser shares a surprising amount of information with the site’s owner. Screen resolution, time zone, device model and other factors combine to create your browser’s unique “fingerprint.”
Researchers — led by Dr. Nitesh Saxena, associate director of the Texas A&M Global Cyber Research Institute — discovered that websites covertly gather browser fingerprints to track users across sessions and sites, using this information for targeted advertising.
Equipped with this knowledge, researchers can focus on stronger privacy tools and defenses to prevent users’ fingerprints from being used without their consent.
Think of it as a digital signature you didn’t know you were leaving behind.
We were able to detect not just the presence of fingerprinting, but whether it was being used to identify and target users — which is much harder to prove.
