What you need to know about fingerprints - the key to digital prints in five minutes

Here was a user from Saratov. And here is a user from Chita, who purchased goods from the marketplace... The identity of everyone wandering the expanses of the Internet can now be identified and verified by digital fingerprints. But what kind of technology is this? And how do you protect yourself 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 key things to know about digital fingerprints (just the facts):

• Not every site tracks users with fingerprints. Implementing recognition using this technology requires expensive solutions that only large IT companies can afford. Most often identification by digital fingerprints is used by social networks, advertising platforms, betting shops, financial services and cryptocurrency exchanges.

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

• The efficiency of this technology is due to its composite architecture. A digital fingerprint is a combination of several dozens of parameters, the value of which is taken into account when identifying a user.

• According to studies, changing one parameter that a browser shares with tracking systems can distort a fingerprint by as little as 0.3%. Therefore, comprehensive fingerprint distortion is required to achieve complete anonymity of Internet surfing.

• The fingerprint includes the following indicators: the type of device used, its model and technical characteristics of its components (CPU clock frequency, number of cores, amount of RAM), OS and its bit depth, the browser, its version, etc.

• Modern identification systems in addition to the above-mentioned parameters use additional technologies. For example, Canvas Fingerprinting. The principle of its work is to force the user's device to draw a graphical primitive using HTML5 element canvas.

So, it is safe to say that every user's device has a unique handwriting.

• Only specialized anti-detect browsers can bypass fingerprinting technology. They allow you to distort digital fingerprints by replacing multiple parameters that are taken into account by tracking systems.

• Anti-detectionists use proxies to increase privacy. They use them to change the real IP of the device. By this parameter, antifraud systems determine the geographical location of the user.

  Digital footprints are nothing to be afraid of

  In fact, there is nothing scary about fingerprinting technology. Most often it is used to identify users in social networks and for targeting ads based on their interests. And if you still want to be anonymous, use Undetectable, which provides complete privacy on the Internet.