What You Need to Know About Fingerprints - The Essentials of Digital Footprints in Five Minutes

Here is where the user from Saratov was browsing. And here is the user from Chita who was purchasing goods on the marketplace... The identity of everyone traversing the expanses of the internet can now be identified and recognized through digital fingerprints. But what is this technology? And how can one protect themselves from it?

What is a digital fingerprint?

A brief excursion into fingerprint technology will be useful for anyone who uses the World Wide Web. The main things to know about digital fingerprints (only facts):

• Not every website tracks users using fingerprints. Expensive solutions are required to implement recognition using this technology, which are affordable only for large IT companies. Social networks, advertising platforms, bookmakers, financial services, and cryptocurrency exchanges are the most common users of identification through digital fingerprints.

• Compared to other identification technologies, fingerprints provide high recognition accuracy - up to 99%.

• The effectiveness of this technology is explained by its composite architecture. A digital fingerprint is a combination of several dozen parameters, the values of which are taken into account when identifying a user's identity.

• According to the results of conducted research, changing one parameter that the browser shares with tracking systems can distort the fingerprint by only 0.3%. Therefore, achieving complete anonymity in internet surfing requires a comprehensive distortion of the fingerprint.

• The following indicators are included in the fingerprint: the type of device used, its model and technical characteristics (CPU clock frequency, number of cores, amount of RAM), operating system and its bitness, browser, its version, etc.

• In addition to the listed parameters, modern identification systems use additional technologies. For example, Canvas Fingerprinting. Its principle of operation consists of forcibly rendering a graphic primitive by the user's device using the HTML5 canvas element.

Therefore, it can be confidently stated that any user device has a unique signature.

• Only specialized anti-detection browsers can bypass fingerprint technology. They allow distorting digital fingerprints by replacing multiple parameters that are taken into account by tracking systems.

• Anti-detection tools use proxies to increase the level of confidentiality. They change the real IP address of the device. Based on this indicator, anti-fraud systems determine the geographical location of the user.

There is no need to fear digital traces

In reality, there is nothing scary about fingerprint technology. It is most often used to identify users on social networks and for targeted advertising based on interests. And if you still want anonymity, then use Undetectable, which ensures complete confidentiality on the internet.