When you use a search engine, you leave behind quite a bit of sensitive data, which data brokers glean to sell to interested third parties, like health and life insurance companies. The large majority of sites use this data to personalize the advertisements and information that they serve up to you. Websites mostly use browser fingerprinting to track your online travels. This process is therefore called “browser fingerprinting.” Websites use the information that browsers provide to identify unique users and track their online behavior. Panopticlick found that only 1 in 286,777 other browsers will share the same fingerprint as another user. However, there’s a significantly small chance for another user to have 100% matching browser information. These data points might seem generic at first and don’t necessarily look tailored to identify one specific person. That means that, when you connect to the internet on your laptop or smartphone, your device will hand over a bunch of specific data to the receiving server about the websites you visit.īrowser fingerprinting is a powerful method that websites use to collect information about your browser type and version, as well as your operating system, active plugins, time zone, language, screen resolution and various other active settings. Fingerprints can be used to fully or partially identify individual users or devices even when cookies are turned off.” “A device fingerprint, machine fingerprint, or browser fingerprint is information collected about a remote computing device for the purpose of identification. Wikipedia defines browser fingerprinting as follows: But first, let’s start by exploring what, exactly, browser fingerprinting is. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to wipe all of your fingerprints from the internet. H ave you ever heard of browser fingerprinting? It’s okay if you haven’t, since almost nobody else has ever heard of it, either.īrowser fingerprinting is an incredibly accurate method of identifying unique browsers and tracking online activity.