New Tracking Technology: To be lit on the Internet – STERN.DE

W ou will exactly we all watched on the Internet, not only by intelligence agencies but also and above all by the advertising industry, shows the case of Janet Vertesi . She is a sociologist and teaches at the U.S. Princeton University. In May she made her own attempt publicly, in which she tried to keep her own pregnancy before the data collectors of the advertising industry secret. It was no easy feat.

Vertesi wanted to find out “what is important if you want to prevent, persecuted and to be put into databases,” she explained to the Internet Conference “Theorizing the Web “. Whether in social networks, online stores and e-mails – all lurking Advertisers who tried to get to their data, to turn her into giant ads rompers and baby oil. In the end she was surfing with the encryption tool TOR on the net, leaving only pick up stores and bought with Amazon gift cards from the drugstore in order to allow any conclusions regarding credit card information. One can also say that. To protect their privacy, Vertesi had to proceed as a criminal

But perhaps in the future is not even the possible, at least not online. Using a technology called “Canvas fingerprinting” enables advertisers to keep track of a user’s right across the network, more than it ever could a cookie. A team of U.S. and Belgian scientists has found that the technology is already being used on five percent of the 100,000 most popular websites in the world – including the erotic portal Youporn, the website of the White House, or “t-online.de” <. / p>

But how does the digital fingerprint? The driven website where the technology is used, causes the browser to secretly in the background an invisible image (“canvas” on German “painting”) to create. Depending on the computer and browser version, the images differ minimally from one another, so that the combination of browser and computer is uniquely identifiable. The image is created and analyzed by the computer in a split second and allowed the company to recognize the browser, computer, and usually the user clearly.

In contrast to cookies could be in front of the art not protect both browser protection settings and ad blockers are useless, says the Russian developer Valentin Wasilyew of “Pro Publica”. According to the U.S. Portal “The Verge”, the tool can detect the correct assignment in 90 percent of cases. Only on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, the software is still very prone to error.