Browser Fingerprinting: What Your Browser Is Telling Everyone About You
You’re constantly leaving your fingerprint all over the internet. You leave it with the personal information you share willingly, the personal information you share unknowingly, and with the mountain of data that gets sent to each website you load. Maybe you know a thing or two about privacy and decided to pick up a VPN to keep your browsing private. Even then, you’re a lot less private than you expect.
Your PC and the millions of servers that make up the internet share a lot of information, but the vast majority of it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of personally identifiable information. For instance, a website might know that your default system language is English, so it loads the English version of its website. That’s not personally identifiable. Sure, the website knows English is your preferred language, but the same is true for hundreds of millions of others.
In isolation, this data doesn’t mean much of anything. Together, however, it can identify you. This is the data that makes up your browser fingerprint, and it can be used to track you across the internet, even when visiting different websites, opening different browsers, and when you have a VPN turned on. Here’s everything you need to know.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance