Protect Yourself from Invasive Digital Fingerprinting

July 28, 2020—Online advertisers have in recent years pivoted from tracking cookies to a much more sophisticated—and largely invisible—method of data mining that acquires highly detailed information about your computer and the ways you use it to determine how best to sell to you. This significantly more invasive form of digital profiling is known as fingerprinting. Far from just the innocuous placement of targeted ads in your web browser, fingerprinting can be used to determine facts about you ranging from how many children you have in college, to which make and model of vehicles you and your family drive, to where and when you are likely to be away on vacation.

Fingerprinting can even alter the price you pay for health insurance. In July, JAMA Open Network published research warning that, while there are existing regulations against the misuse of personal health data, no such regulations apply generally to all forms of data; and all data is potentially health data. Digital information sources outside of healthcare but entirely within the law that could build an unfavorable profile of you include activity-tracking apps, text conversations, and online banking. In the extreme, the researchers note that “a grocery store receipt could be used to predict a person’s hemoglobin A1c level.”

Simply put, fingerprinting is a stealth method of personal-data collection that detects information about your PC, other devices, and the ways you use them, and then uses it to identify you.

Fingerprinting looks at specific device characteristics, including operating system, computer make and model, and even screen resolution. This info is used to follow you around the web, as well as monitor your program usage. Once enough data is collected, a specific profile of you is created: a fingerprint.

Cookie- and pixel-based tracking have been significantly blocked in recent years. System Mechanic® Ultimate Defense™, for example, lets you easily automate clearance of your web cookies and browser history within Privacy Guardian™, the software’s online privacy tool.

Companies have therefore been looking for new ways to gather personal information. Fingerprinting is particularly insidious, as it happens unbeknownst to most users. Cookies are somewhat outdated web trackers stored on your PC that you can see and delete; fingerprinting happens undetected on websites and within apps.

Fingerprinting takes advantage of your browser automatically giving websites information about your computer’s hardware during the course of your web browsing. This fairly innocuous data collection functions mostly to make websites load properly. But with enough information gathered, fingerprinting can reliably intrude on your privacy and compromise your identity—and it is very difficult to opt out of.