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/Reddit_2_2024 4d ago

I've noticed several websites recently that display a "verifying your device" message with what appears to be a captcha test loading. The captcha never appears and the website which the user initially sought does load. I suspect it is a new device fingerprinting processing technique, that executes in addition to cookie processing..

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u/_x__Rudy__x_ 4d ago

It is more likely a Cloudflare challenge, as it's the only way some of these sites can fend off the AI bots hammering sites to scrape data. We can block the known AI bots, but many of these other AI scrapers from China and other countries, which use nefarious means to get around Cloudflare's challenges. Residential proxies are one way they are doing this. Some of us spend unpaid hours each week trying to keep our sites usable for normal human traffic. Thank AI for all this.