The Globe And Mail is reporting on a new technology that is rapidly spreading through major websites that not only tracks you without your knowledge, but there’s no way for you to evade it:
Canvas fingerprinting, which can command your browser to draw a unique identifier and then log your online behaviour, is nearly impossible to detect, does not fall under “do not track” voluntary systems and evades most conventional ad-blocking software. It is already tracking users on 5 per cent of the biggest sites on the Internet, including The White House, Starbucks, Re/Max Canada, Canadian retailers Metro and Home Hardware, Postmedia website Canada.com, as well as a number of pornography sites.
That’s not encouraging. If you read the complete article, you’ll see how chilling this is. At least with conventional technologies, you can can evade them by clearing cookies or setting the “do not track” option on your web browser of choice correctly. Now, all that is off the table. What’s also interesting is that when websites were contacted about why they were using Canvas fingerprinting, most of them yanked it out or committed to doing so quickly. That sounds like they got caught with their hand in the metaphorical cookie jar.
What this proves is something that I’ve been saying for a while now. You should have no reasonable expectation of privacy anymore. It doesn’t exist. You can also bet that even if Canvas fingerprinting disappears (which it won’t), there will be some other technology that will be even more invasive and even more stealthy to replace it.
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This entry was posted on July 23, 2014 at 7:33 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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New Technology Tracks Your Web Usage Without Your Knowledge
The Globe And Mail is reporting on a new technology that is rapidly spreading through major websites that not only tracks you without your knowledge, but there’s no way for you to evade it:
Canvas fingerprinting, which can command your browser to draw a unique identifier and then log your online behaviour, is nearly impossible to detect, does not fall under “do not track” voluntary systems and evades most conventional ad-blocking software. It is already tracking users on 5 per cent of the biggest sites on the Internet, including The White House, Starbucks, Re/Max Canada, Canadian retailers Metro and Home Hardware, Postmedia website Canada.com, as well as a number of pornography sites.
That’s not encouraging. If you read the complete article, you’ll see how chilling this is. At least with conventional technologies, you can can evade them by clearing cookies or setting the “do not track” option on your web browser of choice correctly. Now, all that is off the table. What’s also interesting is that when websites were contacted about why they were using Canvas fingerprinting, most of them yanked it out or committed to doing so quickly. That sounds like they got caught with their hand in the metaphorical cookie jar.
What this proves is something that I’ve been saying for a while now. You should have no reasonable expectation of privacy anymore. It doesn’t exist. You can also bet that even if Canvas fingerprinting disappears (which it won’t), there will be some other technology that will be even more invasive and even more stealthy to replace it.
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This entry was posted on July 23, 2014 at 7:33 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.