Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block

[bill]

More scary tracking technology for advertisers to use instead of cookies:

Meet the Online Tracking Device That is Virtually Impossible to Block

A new, extremely persistent type of online tracking is shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com.

First documented in a forthcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor's Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user's device a number that uniquely identifies it.

Like other tracking tools, canvas fingerprints are used to build profiles of users based on the websites they visit — profiles that shape which ads, news articles, or other types of content are displayed to them.

[Gurtie]

oooh that's clever.

[Rooftop]

Replied to this earlier, but it got lost somewhere along the way.

I was wondering who this compared with general browser fingerprinting.  My hunch is that it is less granular but easier to use in practice.  In terms of addthis, it is still very blockable  -you can easily block their whole script. It's when we (sorry, they) all start implementing it as first part and sharing the resulting data that it gets very hard to block.

I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about this stuff.  There is genuine concern in advertising circles about the possibility of a "post cookie landscape".  If that comes about then currently Google and Apple seem to hold all the cards as they control two two big ecosystems: Apple gives all it's users a unique advertising ID already, Google does the same on mobile, but that is effectively tied to your account anyway.   Although we're inclined to see those as the big players there is a lot of advertising money that doesn't sit in those camps and there are people who want to keep it that way as more of that money moves online / cross device.

[rcjordan]

> lost

We have 2 threads. Let's stick with Bill's.

http://th3core.com/talk/web-development/addthis-persistent-tracking/msg32488/#msg32488