But what about we look at your time zone? There are 24 of those. The chance of guessing which of those people is you is 1/1000 or 0.001. Suppose you and 1,000 other people all bought the same iPad.
Icab slang code#
To understand the claim made by this code that this is 99.5% accurate, consider some simple math. The screen below shows your fingerprint and the metrics gathered from your machine used to calculate that fingerprint. The programmers of this code wanted to expose this practice by providing JavaScript code and links to other code and research to explain how fingerprinting works. I sourced this code and put it on a web server. To find your fingerprint, visit this page I set up. And, it does this without displaying the image at all. To figure that out, the web site sends you a graphic of a known size and resolution, then reads the pixel resolution that your browser is able to display. It does not require access to the operating system at all.Īt least one item, screen resolution, does require some clever thinking. What’s remarkable is that fingerprinting is able to extract this information simply by querying what is in the browser. The authors of that open source code say there are working on gathering other metrics that advertisers use, such as information about your camera. These metrics are available in the fingerprinting JavaScript code, shown below. To be specific, fingerprinting uses these metrics: As long as you are using the same device and browser, every time you visit a web site that uses fingerprinting, that website knows who you are-with approximately 95% to 99.5% accuracy. Because this algorithm uses the same calculation every time, it will provide the same value (number) every time. The fingerprint takes all that data, turns it into numbers, sums it, and then runs a calculation over it to yield a single value.
Other information can be stolen in clever ways that researchers have discovered. Much of this information is contained in the browser. It shocks me that the techniques of spy agencies have gone mainstream.Ī fingerprint is a number that is calculated from information about your computer, some of it the user perhaps thinks might be private. Now, advertisers are using these same techniques. I first heard about fingerprinting in The Washington Post, when Edward Snowden said, in the information he gave to journalists, that the NSA was using the screen resolution of computers to identify terrorists and others. Who is most vulnerable to fingerprinting?ĭoes this approach work for all browsers and operating systems? Different companies have developed browser plug-ins to block fingerprinting, and one open-source project has given away their code, which shows how fingerprinting works-and we’ll explain in this article. This tracking is such a shocking invasion of privacy that I feel compelled to explain it and how you can block it.
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