Stay Stealthy: Mastering the Art of Protecting Your Digital Footprint

Every action on the internet, from social media posts to online translations, leaves a unique trace. Based on this information, any website can understand that you visited it, not someone else. How does fingerprint identification work? How could you protect your data from tracking? The answers are in the article.

What is a digital fingerprint?

A fingerprint is a unique set of different parameters by which web pages recognize users. For example, a user visits a site with a MacBook Pro from the USA. In the system settings, they have the English language selected, GMT-6 time zone, and the Adblock extension installed in the browser. Individually, all these parameters are encountered by millions of other people, but together - so rarely that the user can be identified with over 90% accuracy. Online resources use fingerprints to track user behavior, tailor advertisements, and detect fraudulent activities.

What Information is in a Digital Fingerprint?

The browser fingerprint contains parameters such as:

• operating system;
• browser version;
• plugins;
• device type (mobile or desktop);
• screen resolution;
• language;
• time zone;
• fonts;
• visit history;
• cookie settings, and more.

The browser transmits all these device parameters to websites to ensure that information is displayed correctly on your device. Therefore, unlike cookie files, you can’t just block a digital fingerprint's transmission.

Why is privacy important?

Digital fingerprints contain personal information, potentially leading to data leaks. According to Statista, in 2023, the average cost of such an incident for companies was $4.5 million. For regular users, relevant threats are financial fraud, virtual identity theft, or unauthorized surveillance. However, the biggest problem with fingerprints arises for people who manage multiple accounts. It is by fingerprints that websites identify their profiles and ban them for multi-accounting.

How to protect your digital fingerprint?

You can protect your data from tracking via fingerprint using a browser for multi-accounting, such as the Octo browser. It is a program that substitutes digital fingerprints at the browser core level. The user creates several profiles, selects a different fingerprint for each, and websites identify their accounts as belonging to one person.

Octo Browser uses fingerprints of real people so that websites do not doubt their authenticity. Octo profiles flawlessly pass popular checkers, for instance Pixelscan, BrowserLeaks, and CreepJS. It makes Octo a safe tool for multi-accounting and maintaining anonymity on the internet.