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There is a new tracking cookie, and nothing you can do to stop it

Yesterday we highlighted the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Privacy Badger to help you stay a bit safer online, but it seems like that might not be enough. Researchers have just announced that there is possibly a new way to track you online – and there is nothing you can do about it.

In their research paper The Web never forgets: Persistent tracking mechanisms in the wild, the researchers detail what they call ‘canvas fingerprinting’, drawing a unique and hidden image with standard web development code. In other words, it’s a hidden image with tracking capabilities and online privacy software and plug-ins can’t detect it.

“Canvas fingerprinting uses the browser’s Canvas API to draw invisible images and extract a persistent, long-term fingerprint without the user’s knowledge,” the researchers explained in their paper.

They added that at least 5.5% of the top 100 000 websites that they crawled already made use of the hidden tracking technique, and it has not previously been reported in the wild.

And at the moment it doesn’t seem like any ad blocker, privacy control plug-in or Do Not Track settings will make any difference. “There doesn’t appear to be a way to automatically block canvas fingerprinting without false positives that block legitimate functionality; even a partial fix requires a browser source-code patch.”

Although the main culprit is one particular domain, there are others that are slowly catching up to the new way of being sneaky.

“Even though the overwhelming majority (95%) of the scripts belong to a single provider (addthis.com), we discovered a total of 20 canvas fingerprinting provider domains, active on 5542 of the top 100,000 sites. Of these, 11 provider domains, encompassing 5532 sites, are third parties.”

In the conclusion, the researchers detail that users should be very careful in their use of existing tools and that users should accept that there are a number of drawbacks. But with the increase in hidden tracking tools, user have to constantly update their software.

“The rapid pace at which new tracking techniques are developed and deployed implies that users must constantly install and update new defensive tools. It is doubtful that even privacy-conscious and technologically savvy users can adopt and maintain the necessary privacy tools without ever experiencing a single misstep.”

The full research paper can be viewed here.

[Image – CC by 2.0/Russell Watkins]

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