Canvas Fingerprinting

From Komando.com (July 22):

There's a scary new method of tracking people's behavior online. It's called "canvas fingerprinting" and it's fascinating but frightening technology.

Typically, sites and advertisers know what sites you click on and when by installing what are known as "tracking cookies" on your computer whenever you visit a site.

Here's how it works:

In HTML 5 - the standard computer code for most modern websites - every site can be programmed with a "canvas" that you can draw pictures on. This canvas doesn't have to be visible and can't currently be blocked by the usual methods.

Sites that track  you with canvas fingerprinting use the canvas to capture an image of your browser. Every browser on each individual computer is unique, just like a fingerprint. This tracking tool follows that fingerprint around the Web. [read more]

Yea, it is kind of unnerving. Some of the websites that use this technology are: The Blaze.com (kind of surprised by this), NOAA.gov, usnews.com, dailykos.com, aarp.org, whitehouse.gov (no surprise there), ssa.gov, dhs.gov  etc. You can go to the “secure homes” website to search for a specific website.  There are in total 5,619 sites that use the software. That’s quite a few.

If you wondering the NSA.gov and CIA.gov website doesn’t use the technology for some reason.  At least they are not listed on the website anyway. 48 gov’t websites use canvas fingerprinting including cities, states and foreign countries.

The AddThis.com website  and another company created the software. That’s why it is on a lot of website. To be transparent, I use the AddThis widget on my blog but don’t see any of the analytics.

According to Wikapedia.com, AddThis only uses the data from the tests for internal research.