Hacker News Reader

Comment by haecceity | Hacker News Reader

I think Firefox prompts the user when a website tries to use the microphone. Or am I wrong? Does Chrome have this feature?

View on HN

It's not tracking your voice. It's tracking how your browser plays the audio files. Essentially fingerprinting your hardware. Honestly, i hope there are joker like villains out there fucking with all these fingerprinting companies by feeding them bad data.

Filtering out bad data is a part of the job when analyzing the data for information...There are tons of ways people try to mess with these to the point where in a way it's trivial to filter it out-since basically you're trying to extract value in a way that is not real.

For a contrived eg, serving an ad for a niche product instead of the targeted ad and the ad still getting tons of clicks signals pretty highly that the data coming in is being gamed in some way.

It's called click fraud and it's pretty heavily researched

What information do they get from playing audio? Don't they just send some bytes to the audio device?

The web audio APIs allow you to generate an audio waveform, process that waveform, and then read the waveform. The article covers how to do this. I'm still a bit confused about why it provides such a good fingerprint, I would have thought it would only vary by browser and version, and then only if the browser updates its audio algorithms. But I'm guessing the APIs interact with the OS in some way to do the processing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com