A new study entitled, The Web Never Forgets, outlines three relatively new strategies websites are employing to track users in spite of their best prevention efforts: Canvass Fingerprinting, Evercookies & Respawning and Cookie Syncing.
Canvass Fingerprinting: "exploit(s) the subtle differences in the rendering of the same text to extract a consistent fingerprint that can easily be obtained in a fraction of a second without user's awareness."
Evercookies & Respawning: "By utilizing multiple storage vectors that are less transparent to users and may be more difficult to clear, evercookies provide an extremely resilient tracking mechanism, and have been found to be used by many popular sites to circumvent deliberate user actions."
Cookie Syncing: "the practice of tracker domains passing pseudonymous IDs associated with a given user, typically stored in cookies, amongst each other."
These three tactics are a huge win for advertisers against a host of new privacy and consumer-focus options that allow users to prevent being tracked. While there are tracker transparency plug-ins available today, will they be able to keep up with increasingly clandestine tactics?
In particular, it is notable that ALL the top 10 websites using Evercookies and Respawning are based in China and Russia (exception: Hong Kong), countries notorious for lack of freedom, cyber-espionage and anti-privacy. How will such new efforts - purposely designed to circumvent existing privacy mechanisms - play out in democratic societies against the backdrop of increasing privacy concerns raised in courts and governments? For digital marketers, is there a limit when it comes to profit vs customer respect?
Full Source: The Web Never Forgets: Persistent Tracking Mechanisms in the Wild.
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