Browser fingerprint: What your browser tells everyone about you

The problem with browser fingerprinting is that it is probabilistic in nature. It looks at a trove of data to track you online, not any individual piece of information. For example, a virtual private network (VPN). Hide your IP address And make you appear in a different place. If enough other data in your fingerprint is consistent, it can still be used to track you. Your IP address may be different, but everything else about your browsing is not.

There may be practical use cases for fingerprinting, but you don’t have much to say about that. Even with protections like GDPR, the moment you load a website, there are likely a few dozen (if not more) trackers copying the information your browser shares for their own purposes. Services like Fingerprint leverage that information to create an ID, but make no mistake, the data is always there.

How to get around browser fingerprinting

You can’t get around browser fingerprinting, at least not without significant compromises to your browsing experience (more on that later). Even if you wanted to spoof or scramble every piece of data your browser sends, it would likely work against you. The goal of avoiding fingerprinting is to become an online Jane Doe; You want to disappear in the crowd, so every piece of information that makes you stand out sends up a red flag.

The best way to fight fingerprinting is to hide or alter enough information that tracking you becomes more difficult, not impossible. This starts with a VPN, although it doesn’t make you completely anonymous. The most obvious footprint you leave online is your IP address and physical location, and VPNs hide both. More importantly, many Best VPNs Today includes additional anti-fingerprinting tools.

protonvpnwhich is what I use myself, and includes NetShield to block trackers, ads, and malware. It doesn’t prevent fingerprinting, but NetShield can at least catch requests from known trackers and block them to make you more private online. NordVPN It has a similar feature, as does Surfshark.

The most powerful version of this type comes from blockers Windscribe. With its browser extension, you can do things like rotate your browser’s user agent to make it look like you’re using a different browser, as well as spoof your language, time zone, and GPS information to match the VPN server you’re connected to. Again, this will not make you completely anonymous online. But an extension like the one Windscribe offers makes tracking your fingerprint more difficult.