Advertisers and trackers can identify your browser with over 90% accuracy without cookies, without your IP address, and without anything stored on your device. The technique is called browser fingerprinting.
What Is Browser Fingerprinting?
Fingerprinting collects technical attributes from your browser and combines them into a unique identifier. Unlike cookies, there is nothing to delete — the fingerprint is calculated fresh from your browser and hardware characteristics on every visit.
What Makes Up Your Fingerprint?
- Browser type, version, OS and installed plugins
- Screen resolution, color depth and device pixel ratio
- Canvas rendering fingerprint — unique to your GPU and driver
- WebGL 3D rendering characteristics
- Audio processing fingerprint
- Installed fonts, timezone and language settings
How Unique Is It?
EFF research found over 83% of browsers have unique fingerprints. With canvas and audio fingerprinting, uniqueness exceeds 99%. Test your own at Anonymiz Browser Fingerprint Checker.
How to Reduce Your Fingerprint
- Firefox — Enable privacy.resistFingerprinting in about:config. Randomizes canvas, audio and font data.
- Brave Browser — Randomizes canvas, WebGL and audio fingerprints per site by default.
- Tor Browser — Makes all users look identical to defeat fingerprinting entirely.
- uBlock Origin — Blocks fingerprinting scripts at the network level.
