ProPublica reported on new research by a team at KU Leuven and Princeton on canvas fingerprinting. [[Canvas fingerprinting]] allows websites to uniquely identify and track visitors without the use of browser cookies or other similar means. One of the most intrusive users of the technology is a company called AddThis, who are employing it in “shadowing visitors to thousands of top websites, from WhiteHouse.gov to YouPorn.com.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been tracking on this privacy-destroying technology for several years.
While YouPorn quickly removed AddThis after the report was published, the White House website still contains AddThis code. Some White House pages obviously include the AddThis button, such as the White House Blog, and a link to the AddThis privacy policy.
Other pages, like the White House’s own Privacy Policy, load javascript from AddThis, but do not otherwise indicate that AddThis is present. To pick the most ironic example, if you go to the page for the White House policy for third-party cookies, it loads the “addthis_widget.js.” This script, in turn, references “core143.js,” which has a “canvas” function and the tell-tale “Cwm fjordbank glyphs vext quiz” phrase.
(HT BoingBoing!]
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