Top Websites, NSA Can Track Users through Digital Fingerprinting
Close to 1.5 percent of the Internet’s top websites track users without their knowledge or consent, even when visitors enable their browser’s Do Not Track options, according to a research team in Europe.
The team is among the first to expose the real-world practice of “device fingerprinting,” a process that collects the screen size, list of available fonts, software versions, and other properties of the visitor’s computer or smartphone to create a profile that is often unique to that machine, according to Ars Technica. The researchers scanned select pages of the top 10,000 websites as ranked by Alexa and found that 145 of them deployed code based on Adobe’s Flash Player that fingerprinted users surreptitiously. Out of the top million sites, 404 used JavaScript-based fingerprinting.