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Comment by leptons | Hacker News Reader

“Fingerprinting has always been a concern in the privacy community, but until now, we had no hard proof that it was actually being used to track users,”

Huh? In 2025?? Fingerprinting has been around and actively used to track users for probably at least 20 years.

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They said "hard proof". Can you point to openly available "hard proof"? Otherwise your reply is just snark that doesn't add much.

As someone who's been building an adblocker for the last 6 years: yes, there's plenty of proof in the devtools console on more websites than you'd think.

Fingerprintjs [1] is a well known one that gets a lot of use. And if you check EasyPrivacy, you'll see the rules to block it [2] have been in place for a long time.

[1] https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs [2] https://github.com/easylist/easylist/blob/132813613d04b7228c...

Why do you think a porn site was trying to access MIDI devices? To play some smooth jazz?

https://www.obsessivefacts.com/images/blog/2020-04-04-the-ja...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679063

From over a decade ago, a paper on then-commercially-available browser fingerprinting tech, including a study of its deployment in the wild:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/SP.2013.43 Nick Nikiforakis, Alexandros Kapravelos, Wouter Joosen, Christopher Kruegel, Frank Piessens, and Giovanni Vigna. 2013. Cookieless Monster: Exploring the Ecosystem of Web-Based Device Fingerprinting. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP ’13).

Yes. I wrote the code that did it, way, way back when.

Iovation is at least one companies script I know that the financial sector tends to use to get some fingerprinting on. Youngsters, please don't be skeptical. Surveillance hellhole-wise, fingerprinting is and will remain a perennial corporate favorite thing to do.

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