Every time you open a website, your browser quietly shares a surprising amount of information. Much of this data can be used to identify and track you — even if you think you’re browsing privately.
You leave traces of yourself online in many ways: through data you share intentionally, information you reveal unknowingly, and the technical details your browser automatically transmits. Even with privacy tools like a VPN, you’re still far less anonymous than you may believe.
Your computer constantly exchanges details with the servers that make up the web. While most of this information isn’t considered personally identifiable, it still builds a profile of your device and behavior. For example, a site might detect your preferred language and display its content in English — something shared by millions of users.
Individually, these bits of data may seem harmless. But when combined, they create a unique digital fingerprint that can identify you across websites, browsers, and even while using a VPN.
What Is a Browser Fingerprint?
Your browser fingerprint is a set of technical details about your system — such as hardware, software, browser type, plugins, fonts, and display settings — that together form a unique pattern. This fingerprint can follow you online without relying on cookies.
To see your own fingerprint, visit AmIUnique.org. After a short test, you’ll receive a detailed breakdown of the information your browser sends, plus a “uniqueness score” comparing you to millions of other users. Even common setups, like Windows with Chrome, can produce fingerprints unique among millions.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) offers a similar tool called Cover Your Tracks, which evaluates fingerprinting in different ways. For example, while using Linux may not make you unique, your WebGL details (how your browser renders graphics) might. In one test, only 1 in 33,000 browsers shared the same WebGL fingerprint.
Why Browser Fingerprinting Matters
A fingerprint is essentially a combination of harmless attributes — your time zone, installed fonts, browser version, system language, keyboard layout, and more. None of these alone can identify you, but together they can make your profile one of a kind.
For most people, this isn’t used to hack or target them individually. Instead, browser fingerprinting is mostly leveraged for advertising and tracking. Traditional ads rely on cookies — small identifiers that track your visits to websites. Fingerprinting allows advertisers to track you without those cookies, creating an invisible ID that follows your browsing habits.
In a report by ProPublica, it was revealed that AddThis, a company providing social sharing tools, used a technique called canvas fingerprinting. This process draws invisible images in your browser and analyzes how they render to generate a unique signature — without the user or even the host website’s knowledge. AddThis code appeared on thousands of websites, including high-profile ones like the White House’s site and YouPorn.
How and Why Fingerprinting Is Used
Browser fingerprinting isn’t always malicious. Some companies use it for fraud prevention or account security. The most popular fingerprinting framework, FingerprintJS, is used by brands such as Dropbox, Western Union, TikTok, and Trustpilot.
Instead of blocking logins by IP location alone, fingerprints allow smarter protection systems that can detect unusual activity even when a user’s IP changes. They can also help stop cheaters in online games or prevent account sharing on streaming platforms.
The challenge, however, is that fingerprinting is probabilistic — it uses large sets of data to identify users rather than one single marker. A VPN can hide your IP address, but if your browser settings remain consistent, you can still be tracked across sites.
Even under data protection laws like the GDPR, most websites automatically collect dozens of data points the moment they load — and many trackers use this data to form an identifier without asking for consent.
Can You Avoid Browser Fingerprinting?
Completely avoiding fingerprinting is nearly impossible without making web browsing frustrating or impractical. The goal isn’t to be invisible but to blend in — to make your fingerprint less unique.
Using a VPN is a good first step. It hides your IP address and location, reducing the most obvious identifiers. Some VPNs also include features that block trackers and ads, adding another layer of privacy.
- ProtonVPN offers NetShield, which blocks known trackers and malicious sites.
- NordVPN and Surfshark provide similar anti-tracking tools.
- Windscribe goes further with a browser extension that can spoof your user agent (browser type), time zone, language, and GPS to match your VPN server — making it harder for trackers to connect the dots.
For added protection, privacy-focused browsers like Brave and Firefox are excellent choices.
- Brave randomizes fingerprint data, making all Brave users appear more uniform while blocking cross-site tracking.
- Firefox offers fingerprinting resistance and add-ons like Multi-Account Containers, allowing users to isolate activities — for example, keeping shopping, social media, and news sessions separate so they don’t influence one another.
If You Need Maximum Privacy
There are ways to almost completely evade browser fingerprinting — but they come with serious trade-offs. Browsers that block or strip all identifying data are often slow, unstable, and break many modern websites.
The first step is to disable JavaScript, which is responsible for collecting much of your fingerprint data. However, since nearly every website relies on JavaScript, this will cause major functionality issues.
Next, you’d need a VPN and a privacy-oriented browser like Tor or Librewolf.
- Tor routes traffic through a network of encrypted nodes, effectively hiding your identity but at the cost of speed and convenience.
- Librewolf, a privacy-focused Firefox variant, offers strong anti-tracking protection but also suffers from slower load times and broken site features.
Some users turn to “anti-detect” browsers — often used by marketers or bot operators running multiple accounts. These require paid subscriptions and are not designed for ordinary privacy seekers.
Ultimately, extreme privacy comes at a cost. If you go all-in, you’ll likely need to abandon browser extensions, cloud services, and even mainstream operating systems like Windows or macOS, both of which track user data to some extent.
You can take meaningful steps to reduce tracking and make yourself harder to follow online — but if you want absolute privacy, the only sure solution is simple: log off.
Source: Wired.com
