Comment by wat10000

1 day ago

Fingerprinting is an active area of research (both attack and defense), so the answer is, maybe, depending on just how unique your setup is. EFF has a nice demo that will try to fingerprint you and tell you how trackable you are based on non-cookie data: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org

Of course, new techniques are invented all the time, so that may not cover everything.

Unless they are targeting a specific individual for spying purposes, is there any benefit to doing such deep fingerprinting at the individual level, given that multiple people might use the same computer? It seems like knowing every single thing done at that computer may be too much information that might not have value but having more broad-based tracking patterns would be cheaper and more profitable, no?

  • Advertisers say that the better they can target advertisements, the more valuable they are. If so, then every bit of fingerprinting helps. Maybe multiple people use a computer which degrades it for those particular people, but then many other computers are used by only one person, so it's helpful in aggregate. I'm skeptical this actually works, given the atrocious quality of ads that I see when they sneak past my ad blocker, but that's what they say.