What you need: VirtualBox and Ubuntu Time required: Two hours
Web browsers are getting increasingly better at bolstering your security when scouring the internet. InPrivate mode (Edge), Incognito mode (Chrome), Private Browsing (Firefox), and equivalent privacy modes in other browsers, obscure your identity, prevent details of sites you’ve visited showing up in your browsing history, and stop cookies from lingering on your system after you’ve closed the browser window.
These tools are great for users, but not so good for web developers, who will need to find other ways to track and identify you (as we explained in Issue 646’s Cover Feature ‘Don’t Get Tracked in 2023’).
Some developers may use font fingerprinting, for example, whereby a developer will extract a list of all the fonts installed on your computer. If you’ve only installed Windows and Office on your system, this list will look fairly generic and wouldn’t help to distinguish you from the thousands of others visiting a specific online retailer, for example.
On the other hand, you’re more at risk of being identified if you’ve ever
