Academics also discover many new previously unreported JavaScript APIs that are currently being used to fingerprint users. [...]
In an academic paper published earlier this month, a team of academics from the University of Iowa, Mozilla, and the University of California, Davis, has analyzed how popular browser fingerprinting scripts are used today by website operators.
Using a machine learning toolkit they developed themselves and named
FP-Inspector, the research team scanned and analyzed the top 100,000 most popular websites on the internet, according to the Alexa web traffic ranking.
"We find that browser fingerprinting is now present on more than 10% of the top-100K websites and over a quarter of the top-10K websites," the research team said.
However, the research team also points out that despite the large number of websites that are currently using browser fingerprinting, not all scripts are used for tracking. Some fingerprinting scripts are also used for fraud detection since automated bots tend to have the same or similar fingerprints, and fingerprinting scripts are a reliable method of detecting automated behavior. [...]
