Browsers fingerprinting motives, methods, and countermeasures

With the continuous and aggressive competition in advertising businesses, uncontrollably desires have emerged to identify and classify consumers. It is proven that companies must have a clear definition of its target market. Based on this we have seen different ways to identify, analyze, and track consumers, either voluntarily or without their consent. Browser fingerprinting techniques have evolved from being privacy-friendly to privacy intrusive to serve these demands. This also has pushed privacy concerned people to save no effort to advance countermeasures. In this paper we introduce different browser fingerprinting techniques and their relevant technologies in the wild. It additionally elaborates widely known countermeasures. © 2018 IEEE.