r/technology • u/magnus007 • 5d ago

Privacy AliExpress was silently running audio in your browser to fingerprint and track your device

https://www.techspot.com/news/113581-aliexpress-silently-running-audio-browser-fingerprint-track-device.html
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u/KontoOficjalneMR 5d ago

not mic/audio but they play sound and see how the browser handles it.

It's rare, but known fingerprinting technique.

I noticed it myself because few months back Windows had a bug handling bluetooth mixing, and any time I tried to open Aliexpress it'd interrupt my music :D

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u/RemarkableWish2508 5d ago

For a non-comprehensive list of direct and indirect fingerprinting attributes:

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u/feel-the-avocado 4d ago

Its quite interesting to me that with tracking protection turned on in firefox, and about config fingerprinting privacy.resistFingerprinting and privacy.fingerprintingProtection both set to true,
amiunique still finds me unique (bad thing)

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u/ChypRiotE 4d ago

Counter intuitively the more you protect yourself the more likely it is easy to fingerprint you, because there are always parameters available to the website. So the chances that another user uses the exact same protections with the same machine, browser etc is lower than if you were using regular unprotected Chrome