Personal Privacy on the web, please take a giant step backwards!

Blocking tracking and how much personal information on you has been an ongoing battle between consumers who want to free-range the web and business that want to slaughter our privacy rights and to gather as much demographic big data to use in trying to predict our habits and purchasing patterns and today we take a big step backward in protecting ourselves from being exploited.

First documented in a paper that researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium, this type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s Web browser to draw a hidden image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it.

Like other tracking tools, canvas fingerprints are used to build profiles of users based on the websites they visit — profiles that shape which ads, news articles, or other types of content are displayed to them.

But fingerprints are unusually hard to block: They can’t be prevented by using standard Web browser privacy settings or using anti-tracking tools such as AdBlock Plus.
The researchers found canvas fingerprinting computer code, primarily written by a company called AddThis, on 5 percent of the top 100,000 websites. Most of the code was on websites that use AddThis’ social media sharing tools. Other fingerprinters include the Canadian dating site Plentyofish.com and many of today's most popular web-stops.

For more information: <a href="http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/817281-meet-the-online-tracking-device-that-is-virtually-impossible-to-block/" target="new">Click-here</a>

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