We analyzed 100 political candidate websites during the 2018 midterm election and found widespread use of tracking
It used to be so easy to figure out what a web server was doing by examining its underlying HTML coding. Those days are sadly a thing of the distant past. Today’s web servers do so much more: they consolidate a lot of information from various sources, including ad banner networks, images, visitor analytics, tracking cookies, content distribution networks and more. Sadly, this complexity hides a lot of abuses to your privacy.
We studied a group of 100 different political candidate websites during the 2018 midterm elections and found two basic issues of privacy abuse:
The widespread use of canvas fingerprinting to track visitors
The lack of accountability to protect visitors’ private data
Canvas fingerprinting refers to coordinating a series of tracking techniques to identify a visitor using what browser, IP address, computer processor and operating system details and other details. To give you an idea of the data that the browser collects without your knowledge, take a look at the screenshot below from BrowserLeaks.com. It shows my computer running Chrome on a Mac OS v.10.13 using Intel hardware.
HTML Canvas , along with a variety of other fingerprinting techniques, has been around for several years as it is based on the same programming interface used to draw graphics and other animations using Javascript website developers are getting savvy about how to use it to detect who you are and target you accordingly. In the early days of the web, tracking cookies were used to figure out if you had p ..
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