Canvas fingerprint Tracking Technology Based on HTML5

Canvas fingerprint Tracking Technology Based on HTML5

Today, there are many ways to track visitors, such as using the cookie technology on the user side, which has been abandoned by most companies, now there is a new way to replace cookies to track users.

In the past two years, many websites and tracking software have begun to use HTML5 canvas fingerprints. PS: Canvas is the label for dynamic plotting in HTML5.

Each browser generates a different pattern

Basically, Each browser uses different Image Processing engines, different export options, and different compression levels. Therefore, the images drawn by each computer are somewhat different, these patterns can be used to assign specific numbers (fingerprints) to user devices, that is, they can be used to identify different users.

Security researchers at Princeton University and the University of luwen in Belgium have published a study that even computer experts are hard to protect their privacy in the face of canvas fingerprint-based tracking technology.

Canvas uses HTML5 canvas API and JavaScript to dynamically generate the image you want. Like other tracking technologies, in the past two years, this method has been adopted by thousands of websites, from wihtehouse.gov to youporn.com.

This report provides three online tracking mechanisms: canvas fingerprinting, evercookies, and cookie syncing, which can be used to track and identify users without their knowledge.

Application of Canvas tracking in the advertising field

Online advertising companies often track users' behaviors. They hope to understand consumers' behaviors by creating an interest profile for each user.

Generally, if users clear cookies on their computers or stop cookies, advertisers will not know whether visitors have accessed their ads, which greatly reduces the advertising effect, it also reduces the revenue of advertising companies. Therefore, these advertising companies have been committed to trying to update better methods to understand the information of website visitors. Some large advertising companies have converted flash-based advertisements into HTML5 animated advertisements.

The researchers pointed out: "Canvas fingerprints have not been publicly reported as a result of recent research on browser fingerprints. According to our survey, 100000 of the top 5% websites use this technology.

HTML5 canvas is not only limited to image processing, but also monitors users' keyboard input, mouse movement, and touch events. You can find detailed instructions on Mozilla's official website. There are also some examples on Github.

Canvas fingerprint is supported by all mainstream browsers

HTML5 canvas technology is supported by all mainstream browsers and can be accessed through most PCs, tablets, and smart phones. You can use this link to test whether the current browser supports canvas fingerprints.

Currently, canvas fingerprints are hard to block. As long as you use your browser to access the Internet, your whereabouts are quite public.

(What I want to say is to let IE6 kill you in seconds .........)