Your Browser Is Unique Among Millions: How Fingerprinting Works

You can block cookies. You can use incognito mode. You can install every privacy extension in the Chrome Web Store. And websites can still identify you with over 99% accuracy, without storing a single byte of data on your machine. This is browser fingerprinting. It works because the combination of attributes your browser exposes -- screen resolution, installed fonts, GPU renderer, timezone, language, and dozens of other signals -- is almost always unique. Not probably unique. Practically unique among millions of browsers. I started taking this seriously when I read a 2016 study from Lehigh University that found 99.24% of browsers had a unique fingerprint out of a sample of 118,934. A follow-up study in 2020 by researchers at KU Leuven found similar results with modern anti-tracking measures in place. The fingerprint adapts. It doesn't go away. What your browser tells every website you visit Open your browser's developer console and type navigator.userAgent. You'll get a string that inc