If it was useful, it would be much more prevalent but too many people have the same fingerprint.
IP address is a better method of tracking for comparison.
The industry used fingerprinters, but for one it didn't really help them make more money (because you want to track users, not systems), and there was a big backlash.
According to whom? My browser is unique according to panopticlick.
Curious, was the lawsuit in that study also based on GDPR?
So far I haven't seen much coverage of GDPR based lawsuits in the media. Also, I'd like to know if there have been studies that show that EU residents can now (after GDPR) browse the web without leaving a trail of information.
Quote about canvas fingerprinting:
"Comparing our results with a 2014 study [1], we find three important trends. First, the most prominent trackers have by-and-large stopped using it, suggesting that the public backlash following that study was effective. Second, the overall number of domains employing it has increased considerably, indicating that knowledge of the technique has spread and that more obscure trackers are less concerned about public perception. As the technique evolves, the images used have increased in variety and complexity, as we detail in Figure 12 in the Appendix. Third, the use has shifted from behavioral tracking to fraud detection, in line with thead industry’s self-regulatory norm regarding acceptable uses of fingerprinting."
[1] G. Acar,C. Eubank, S. Englehardt, M. Juarez, A. Narayanan,and C. Diaz. The web never forgets: Persistent trackingmechanisms in the wild. InProceedings of CCS, 2014.
Other references:
[10] W. Davis. KISSmetrics Finalizes Supercookies Settlement.http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/191409/kissmet.... [Online; accessed 12-May-2014].
[15] Federal Trade Commission. Google will pay $22.5 millionto settle FTC charges it misrepresented privacy assurancesto users of Apple’s Safari internet browser. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/08/googl..., 2012
Prevalence:
- 1.4% for canvasfingerprinting
- 0.325% for canvasfont probing
- 0.0715% for WebRTC
- 0.0067% forAudioContext
The above were found only on the most shady of all websites, and good content blockers block all those scripts.
My bet is GDPR was the death blow for this kind of scripts. For small companies without a room full of lawyers data has become a liability.
So fingerprinting is now basically in the hands of google, amazon, etc.