Browser Fingerprinting
Also known as: device fingerprinting, canvas fingerprinting
Identifying a user by combining many small browser and device attributes into a unique signature.
Fingerprinting collects properties your browser exposes — installed fonts, screen size, GPU, time zone, available plugins, audio quirks — and hashes them into a near-unique identifier. Unlike cookies, fingerprints survive incognito mode and don't require any storage.
Fingerprinting is harder to stop than cookies. Defences include shipping the same fingerprint to every site (Tor Browser), adding noise to the most identifying APIs (Brave, Firefox) and blocking known fingerprinting scripts entirely (NovaBlock, uBlock Origin).