By now you probably know that your web activity is tracked at pretty much every step. Things like your IP address, a number associated with your connection to your Internet service provider, and cookies, tiny files collected by your web browser, can identify you to websites, advertisers, and anyone who’s interested enough in your data to pay for it. But there are far more complex methods of tracking users on the open Internet – ways that can get past even blocked cookies or an IP address masked with a VPN.
This collection of varied data to groups of users, and sometimes even a single user, is called a digital fingerprint. With a wide enough net cast to collect data through information gathered via websites and advertising, it’s possible to get a startlingly accurate picture of what a specific user is doing online, sometimes down to a near-complete history of their web usage.
WHAT A DIGITAL FINGERPRINT ISN’T
Despite the allusion to something
