Browser Fingerprinting: What Your Browser Is Telling Everyone About You

The problem with browser fingerprinting is that it is probabilistic in nature. It looks at a pool of data to track you online, not any individual information. A VPN, for example, can Hide your IP address and present you in a different position. If the other data in your fingerprint is consistent enough, however, it can still be used to track you. Your IP address may be different, but not everything else about your browsing.

There may be practical use cases for fingerprinting, but you can’t really say much about it. Even with protections like GDPR, the moment you load a website, there are probably dozens (if not more) of trackers copying the information your browser shares for their own purposes. Services like Fingerprint use that information to create an identifier, but make no mistake, the data is always there.

How to get around browser fingerprints

You can’t get around browser fingerprinting, at least not without significant compromises to your browsing experience (more on that later). Even if you were to spoof or obfuscate every bit of data sent by your browser, it would probably work against you. The goal of avoiding fingerprints is to be Jane Doe online; You want to disappear in the crowd, so every piece of information that makes you stand out sends up red flags.

The best way to combat fingerprinting is to hide or rotate enough information to make tracking you more difficult, if not impossible. And that starts with a VPN, though it doesn’t make you completely anonymous. The online fingerprint you leave behind is both your IP address and physical location, and VPNs hide both. More importantly, a lot Best VPN Today includes additional tools to deal with fingerprinting.

ProtonVPNThe ones I use myself include NetShield to block trackers, ads and malware. It doesn’t prevent fingerprinting, but NetShield can at least capture and block requests from known trackers to make you a little more private online. NordVPN has a similar feature, as does Surfshark.

Blocker comes from the most powerful version of this type Windscribe. With its browser extension, you can do things like rotate your browser’s user agent to make it look like you’re using a different browser, as well as spoof your language, time zone, and GPS information to match the connected VPN server. Again, this will not make you completely anonymous online. But an extension like what Windscribe offers makes tracking your fingerprints even more difficult.