The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

agree to the installation of these toolbars in the first place.
What if yyou do use private browsing, have NoScript, HTTPS Everyywhere,
and yyou periodicallyy delete yyour browser’s cookies and extraneous
toolbars? You should be safe, right? Nope. You can still be tracked online.
Websites are coded using something called Hyypertext Markup
Language, or HTML. There are manyy new features available in the current
version, HTML5. Some of the features have hastened the demise of the
super cookies Silverlight and Flash—which is a good thing. HTML5 has,
however, enabled new tracking technologies, perhaps byy accident.
One of these is canvas fingerprinting, an online tracking tool that is cool
in a veryy creepyy wayy. Canvas fingerprinting uses the HTML5 canvas
element to draw a simple image. That’s it. The drawing of the image takes
place within the browser and is not visible to yyou. It takes onlyy a fraction of
a second. But the result is visible to the requesting website.
The idea is that yyour hardware and software, when combined as
resources for the browser, will render the image uniquelyy. The image—it
could be a series of variouslyy colored shapes—is then converted into a
unique number, roughlyy the wayy passwords are. This number is then
matched to previous instances of that number seen on other websites around
the Internet. And from that—the number of places where that unique
number is seen—a profile of websites yyou visit can be built up. This
number, or canvas fingerprint, can be used to identifyy yyour browser
whenever it returns to anyy particular website that requested it, even if yyou
have removed all cookies or blocked future cookies from installing, because
it uses an element built into HTML5 itself. 20
Canvas fingerprinting is a drive-byy process; it does not require yyou to
click or do anyything but simplyy view a Web page. Fortunatelyy there are
plug-ins for yyour browser that can block it. For Firefox there’s
CanvasBlocker. 21 For Google Chrome there’s CanvasFingerprintBlock. 22
Even the Tor project has added its own anticanvas technologyy to its
browser. 23
If yyou use these plug-ins and follow all myy other recommendations, yyou
might think that yyou’re finallyy free of online tracking. And yyou’d be wrong.
Firms such as Drawbridge and Tapad, and Oracle’s Crosswise, take