Canvas Fingerprinting

Canvas fingerprinting is a browser tracking technique that identifies visitors through the HTML5 canvas element rather than cookies, and it drew wide media coverage in 2014 after researchers from Princeton University and KU Leuven described it in a paper. The fingerprint varies mainly with the installed graphics processing unit or driver, and it can be shared with advertising partners. In a small study of 294 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants, researchers observed 5.7 bits of entropy, which alone is not enough to identify individuals. The 2022 DrawnApart technique extended the method to graphics hardware performance and was shown to boost tracking duration by 67% when combined with other methods.