Browser fingerprint test

Why this matters more than your IP

Cookies can be cleared and IP addresses change. A fingerprint is a by-product of the browser doing its job — it has to tell a site the screen size to lay out a page, and it has to render fonts and graphics to show them. Trackers collect a couple of dozen of these values, hash them, and use the hash as an identifier that follows you across sites, across VPN servers, and across private-browsing sessions. The EFF's Panopticlick project found in 2010 that 84% of browsers were unique; modern browsers expose more, not less, though the privacy-focused ones have started pushing back.

What each signal contributes

Screen resolution and colour depth are moderately identifying. Installed fonts, detected by measuring how text renders, are highly identifying on desktops. Canvas and WebGL fingerprints capture how your particular graphics card and driver draw a test image, which differs subtly between machines. Timezone and language locate you geographically regardless of VPN. Hardware concurrency and memory identify the class of device. The estimates on this page are from published distributions of each value and are indicative, not a measurement against a live population.

Reducing it

The strategy that works is to look like many other people, not to look like no one: blocking canvas entirely is itself rare and therefore identifying. Tor Browser standardises everything. Firefox's resist-fingerprinting does most of the same. Brave adds per-site randomisation so the hash differs everywhere. On any browser, keeping the window at a common size, the default fonts, and the default language reduces the bits.