Google Chrome lacks protection against one of the most basic and common ways to track users online
Browser fingerprinting is everywhere
Google markets its Chrome browser by citing its superior safety features, but according to privacy consultant Alexander Hanff, Chrome does not protect against browser fingerprinting – a method of tracking people online by capturing technical details about their browser.
“There are at least thirty distinct fingerprinting techniques that work in Chrome right now, today, as you read this,” wrote Hanff, an occasional contributor to The Register, in a recently published critique of Google’s browser.
“Not theoretical attacks from academic papers that might work under laboratory conditions – real, production techniques deployed on millions of websites to identify and track you without your knowledge or consent.”
Visitors to websites can leave behind a browser fingerprint that records the OS they are running, their screen resolution, and installed fonts. That info is carried in traffic from a browser to a web server, or information available to the server or third parties through page scripts and tracking elements. Browser fingerprints can become unique identifiers.
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