Browserprint: An Analysis of the Impact of Browser Features on Fingerprintability and Web Privacy

Abstract: Web browsers are indispensable applications in our daily lives. Millions of users use web browsers for a wide range of activities such as social media, online shopping, emails, or surfing the web. The evolution of increasingly more complicated web applications relies on browsers constantly adding and removing features. At the same time, some of these web services use browser fingerprinting to track and profile their users with clear disregard for their web privacy. In this paper, we perform an empirical analysis of browser features evolution and aim to evaluate browser fingerprintability. By analyzing 33 Google Chrome, 31 Mozilla Firefox, and 33 Opera major browser versions released through 2016 to 2020, we discover that all of these browsers have unique feature sets which makes them different from each other. By comparing these features to the fingerprinting APIs presented in literature that have appeared in this field, we conclude that all of these browser versions are uniquely fingerprintable. Our results show an alarming trend that browsers are becoming more fingerprintable over time because newer versions contain more fingerprintable APIs compared to older ones.