Individual digital fingerprint – a reality that has crept up unnoticed
Everyone has known for a long time about evil hackers and selfish managers who leak user databases. But there is another way to obtain data. It was a revelation to me that simply by opening a website page for the first time, the user leaves his digital fingerprint. Which is unique, like an INN. And cookies it has nothing to do with it
The vast majority of people do not suffer from persecution mania. This means that they install the most popular browsers on their computers (for example, Google Chrome or Yandex Browser) and do not change their default settings. At most, they use private mode to view websites.
Bad news #1. Private browser mode does not protect against the creation of a digital fingerprint.
What is a digital fingerprint? These are the values of several parameters that: a) characterize only your connection to the site (for any other visitor to this site, the parameter values will be different), b) the site can save this digital fingerprint in its database, at least to recognize you the next time you visit it.
Bad news #2. Creating a digital fingerprint is not difficult. And its value does not depend on a specific site – the fingerprint will be the same for all sites as long as you access them from your computer or phone.
In a couple of hours of googling, I managed to collect more than 10 parameters that form a digital fingerprint, and understand how their values are determined. For those interested in seeing how sites can “see” you, here are some links
There are projects that professionally deal with identification by digital fingerprint, for example FingerprintJS. According to them, the commercial version of the product provides user identification accuracy of more than 99%. The goal of such developments is good – the fight against fraud and information security.
Bad news #3. Projects that have begun to collect information about digital fingerprint owners in one place are actively developing.
Using the same dmp.one project as an example, which was discussed in the article above. Just four screenshots from their main page give an idea of the data collection scheme. I will immediately stipulate that other similar projects for collecting information about site visitors work on the same principle, I have no relation to dmp.one.
Well, to finish the conversation about dmp.one – search engine publicwww.com found more than 3000 sites with the dmp.one script installed. There are probably even more in reality
Enough bad news!
Good news. There are ways and techniques risk reduction your identification when visiting websites. They are not complicated, accessible but require compliance with the rules of “digital hygiene”. However, I am not an information security specialist. I hope the community will share competent advice in the comments.
