As privacy experts constantly remind everyone, when it comes to tracking using web fingerprinting, users can run, but they simply can’t hide.
Most people assume third-party cookies are the main way they’re tracked from website to website and across different web sessions, and to a large extent that’s still true.
More recently, however, browsers and adblockers have started clamping down on this way of profiling users, which is why a second technique dating back a decade has come to the fore. It’s called browser profiling, aka the ‘cookieless monster’.
It works by analysing dozens of characteristics of a user’s software and hardware setup, which taken together form a unique pattern or fingerprint.