Tag Archives: canvas

The array of sneaky tricks to get past Internet users’ veil of privacy is astonishing. At least it would be, if we weren’t all past the capacity for astonishment. One which has been around for years is Canvas fingerprinting. It lets servers narrow your profile down to a small number of clients. Combined with other measures, it can uniquely identify you.

How Canvas works

Canvas wasn’t designed to spy on you. It’s a way to draw graphics very efficiently in a browser. It supports animation and interaction. In order to get fast performance, it allows hardware acceleration and doesn’t mandate the exact set of pixels to be drawn. The server can then get those pixels back using getImageData() or toDataURL() in the Canvas API.
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