What fingerprinting is and why it regards all customers

With the progressive setting aside of cookies, advertisers use this technique to track users online, which is even more treacherous and on which not enough is being done for the moment.

Cookies capable of tracking all users’ online activities are (slowly) disappearing. In recent years, major web browsers, including Safari and Firefox, have limited the practice, and even Chrome has realized that it represents a privacy nightmare. But stopping cookies means ending only one type of online tracking, leaving others likely to be worse. Fingerprinting (which means leaving a trace), which involves collecting detailed information about the settings of your browser or phone, falls into this category.

It’s a largely covert tracking method, there’s not much that can be done to stop it, and regulators have done little to limit how companies use it to follow users on the internet.

The exact combination of lines and grooves that make up a person’s fingerprints is unique. Likewise, what happens to your browser is a collection of information gained by a phone or laptop each time it is used, which advertisers can then link back to the user. Fingerprinting allows you to take information about your browser, network or device and combine it to create a set of features that is mostly uniquely yours. The data that make up your ‘fingerprint’ can include your language, the keyboard you use, your time zone, whether or not you have cookies enabled, the latest version of the operating system of your computer etc.