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Clearing your cookies doesn't do much anymore. Sorry to be the one to tell you.
Researchers at Texas A&M and Johns Hopkins recently proved what security folks have been saying for years: websites track you through browser fingerprinting even after you've clicked every "reject tracking" button on the planet. Your browser leaks information constantly. Screen size, fonts, graphics card details. It all adds up to a profile that's basically as unique as an actual fingerprint.
Cookies were the easy villain. The real tracking happens underneath.
About 84% of browsers have a fingerprint unique enough to track across sites. That stat comes from years of research, and it hasn't improved much. Your browser hands over dozens of data points every time you load a page. Canvas rendering, audio processing quirks, your list of installed plugins. Trackers stitch this together into an ID that follows you everywhere.
Google keeps pushing back the deadline on killing third-party cookies in Chrome. They've done it multiple times now. Meanwhile, Chrome holds nearly 68% of the browser market, so most people are still wide open to old-school cookie tracking on top of the fingerprinting stuff.
Here's what catches people off guard though. WebRTC, the technology that makes video calls work in your browser, can expose your real IP address even when you're connected to a VPN. It's a known issue that's been around since 2015, and most users have never heard of it. You can check if you're affected by running an ip leak test in about thirty seconds. The results might surprise you.
WebRTC needs to find your public IP address to set up peer-to-peer connections. That's just how the protocol works. The problem is that any website can trigger this lookup with a bit of JavaScript, and your VPN doesn't always catch it.
Security researcher Daniel Roesler published the original proof-of-concept a decade ago. According to Princeton's Web Transparency & Accountability Project, the vulnerability still bypasses VPN protection on millions of browsers today. Both your local network address and your real public IP can leak through.
Fixing it isn't hard, but you have to know it exists first. Firefox lets you disable WebRTC entirely by going to about:config and setting "media.peerconnection.enabled" to false. Chrome doesn't have a built-in option, so you'll need an extension like uBlock Origin with WebRTC blocking enabled.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation makes Privacy Badger, and it's genuinely useful. Unlike blocklists that need constant updating, Privacy Badger learns which domains are tracking you across sites and blocks them automatically. It catches stuff that other tools miss.
uBlock Origin does double duty as an ad blocker and tracker blocker. It's lightweight, open source, and includes that WebRTC protection I mentioned. Way better than the bloated alternatives.
Brave browser bakes fingerprint randomization right into the browser itself. Firefox has Enhanced Tracking Protection with a strict mode that does something similar. Both can break certain sites, but that's usually a sign the site was doing something sketchy anyway.
Start by testing what you're working with. The EFF's Cover Your Tracks tool shows you exactly how identifiable your browser looks to trackers. Most people find out they're completely unique among millions of samples. Not great.
Pick a VPN that specifically addresses WebRTC leaks. NordVPN and Mullvad both handle this, but don't just take their word for it. Run your own tests after connecting.
You might also try using different browser profiles for different activities. Keep one for work, one for shopping, one for personal stuff. Mozilla's official documentation walks through setting up containers in Firefox, which makes this pretty painless.
Turning off JavaScript completely would stop most fingerprinting cold, but good luck using the modern web that way. NoScript lets you whitelist sites individually, which is a reasonable middle ground.
Tracking methods keep getting smarter. Machine learning systems can now re-identify users even after they've changed their browser configuration, sometimes within hours. They look at behavioral patterns, not just technical fingerprints.
Perfect privacy probably isn't realistic for most people. But you can make tracking expensive and annoying enough that casual surveillance becomes impractical. That's worth something.
The ad networks and data brokers aren't going to stop on their own. If you want less tracking, you'll have to make it happen yourself.
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