With the conclusion of our previous blog series The Weekly Byte we are back and ready to kick off our next 12-part series called The Data Dot. We look forward to embarking on this journey with you, our community members, in learning more about digital privacy and security.
In a previous article, we spoke about digital footprints and how they cover the broad spectrum of privacy invasion. In yet another article we covered cookies and how those nasty little ‘snacks’ track your activity online. But there is something far worse than both of these combined and it’s called digital fingerprinting.
What Is Digital Fingerprinting?
In short, it is a means of digital tracking that goes beyond the reach of regular cookies on websites. It is specifically designed to create a unique profile of individual visitors of websites, gathering various data points on the user. These data points could range anything from your computer hardware, software, add-ons, your settings, and even your browser of choice.
Fingerprinting is generally used by third parties looking to track individuals’ activity online to the finest detail. This allows them access to unprecedented insights into the user’s day-to-day life in terms of the data collected that generate a handsome return for those behind the collection.
Overall, it is highly invasive and disregards privacy choices made by the user meaning that even if you choose to browse in private mode, clear your browsing history and cookies, or use a VPN, the traces of your activity online remain to allow for you to be tracked for months on end. Some even go lower than that by flagging users who activated the “Do Not Track” option in their browsers for fingerprinting.
How Is It Used?
Considering the digital advertising industry in the European Union alone amounting to €146bn, it’s fair to say that there is money to be made from the collection of data. This is exactly what drove digital fingerprinting to become such an explosive industry over the last decade.
The data collected is sold to data brokers who process and resell the datasets to businesses looking to generate personalized marketing models for their consumers.
This is commonly referred to as re-targeting. Traditionally re-targeting is done by using cookies to collect information related to individuals browsing history to easily identify repeat visitors; not only to allow the individual’s web browser to improve the website’s load time but also to increase click-through rates and increase revenue.
Privacy-conscious individuals would clear their cookies regularly. Now envision your browsing habits as a string that connects different pins on a board where every pin represents a website that you have visited. Every time the cookies are cleared, these strings are segmented. The more often the cookies are cleared, the more segmented these strings become, making it more difficult for the trackers to make linkages.
Fingerprinting generates strings that cannot be segmented or severed by creating a new persistent identifier. It practically uses your browser’s best features against you and in their favour.
The Reality Today
So for it to be effective, it needs to meet two major criteria:
- It needs to be persistent: if it can be easily removed, it is of no real value as a tracker and this is one of the main reasons why it has so aggressively taken over from the traditional browser cookie. A user cannot delete a fingerprint simply because it is not stored on their device.
- It needs to be unique: the core purpose of this piece of technology is to identify individual users from one another to create unique profiles. If it cannot do this, it bears no value as a tracker.
Although fingerprinting is not only used for marketing purposes, albeit it is the largest segment utilizing the technology in the industry by far, some reputable websites such as eBay explained, in an article on the topic, that they use the tracking method to fight back against fraudsters in cases of attempted credit card scams. If a device’s activity looks suspicious, it will be flagged. Other websites such as the New York Times in the US advised that they have strict internal rules against tracking users and instead use fingerprinting to guard against bots. Yet some websites were not even aware of the presence of the trackers in which case it gets attributed to third-party advertisements.
How To Guard Against Fingerprinting
For starters, make sure you are using a reputable web browser that is privacy-focused and actively blocks scripts such as fingerprinting. If you are not sure which browser would best suit your needs, give this article a read.
To effectively combat fingerprinting, privacy browsers utilize two primary approaches:
- The first is to void one of the two criteria that are required for fingerprinting to be efficient. This can be done by removing the uniqueness aspect from the browser or individual user making it difficult to impossible for the tracker to differentiate between one or the other.
- The second is to compile a list of known trackers and simply block them from accessing the data that is sought after on the individual’s web browser.
Alternatively, browsers can also combat fingerprinting by making all instances of the browser look the same.
Options such as Firefox and Tor are excellent solutions for this.
Future Solutions
With the constant evolution of technology, it remains a constant arms race between the collection of data and individuals fighting for their right to privacy.
Sadly, not everyone is aware of these threats, or actively learning about them and uprooting the comfort of your ‘digital home’ in terms of changing your browser can be a nightmare.
In a statement by our co-founder, Enzo Snyman, “For years I used Chrome until I learned about the Brave browser a couple of years ago. But after reading the recent blog post on how private some browsers really are (or aren’t) I decided to take the stand and change the browsers on all of the devices in my home to Firefox. It was a nightmare of an undertaking, to be frank, but I’m glad that I did it.”
This is where Nerian Network aims to revolutionize the way that we interact with data and privacy going forward. By putting the power in the hands of the individual to manage their data and decide who is allowed access to it, when and for how long.
Profiling similar to that of fingerprinting would lock the collected data as it is produced into the individual’s personal Data Vault to which only they themselves have access.
In this way, Nerian envisions a future where individuals can experience true privacy while navigating online with the ability to leverage their data to receive consent-driven and time-sensitive advertising while being rewarded for sharing their information.
Data Ownership Re-imagined.
Official Links
External References:
What is fingerprinting? 1
What is fingerprinting? 2
Think you’re anonymous online?
