"You're constantly leaving your fingerprint all over the internet. You leave it with the personal information you share willingly, the personal information you share unknowingly, and with the mountain of data that gets sent to each website you load. Maybe you know a thing or two about privacy and decided to pick up a VPN to keep your browsing private. Even then, you're a lot less private than you expect."
"Your PC and the millions of servers that make up the internet share a lot of information, but the vast majority of it doesn't fall under the umbrella of personally identifiable information. For instance, a website might know that your default system language is English, so it loads the English version of its website. That's not personally identifiable. Sure, the website knows English is your preferred language, but the same is true for hundreds of millions of others."
Web browsers and web servers exchange numerous data points with every page load, including system settings and preferences. Individual signals rarely identify a person, but aggregating many attributes produces a browser fingerprint that can single out a user among millions. Browser fingerprints can persist across different websites and browsers and can be used for cross-site tracking even when a VPN hides the IP address. Tools like AmIUnique reveal the attributes transmitted and compute similarity scores to show how unique a fingerprint is compared with large databases.
Read at WIRED
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