How to Stop Browser Fingerprinting—the Latest Method of Tracking Your Online Activity.

Uninterrupted web browsing used to be much simpler: you just had to disable all third-party cookies, blacklist known tracking domains, and install an ad blocker. But now, online platforms can track data like screen resolution, basic hardware specifications, time zone, and installed fonts to create a unique “fingerprint” of your browser and device. Websites can request a wealth of seemingly innocuous data from your device without triggering any security alerts, and over time, use this data to track your online activity.

If you truly care about your privacy, disabling cookies is no longer enough to ensure anonymity online. Fortunately, browsers like Safari, Firefox, Brave, and others have developed additional privacy features that are free to enable. Let’s explore how they work and what you can do to minimize your digital footprint.

What is browser fingerprinting?

Browser fingerprinting is an advanced tracking method in which a website requests minute technical data about your device, from your operating system to the drivers used by your graphics card, to create a unique digital identifier for your browser. It then uses this identifier to record your sessions on the site and track your online activity, completely bypassing the use of cookies. While modern browsers include powerful blockers that prevent websites from installing cookies on your device, even specialized security solutions such as internet security apps, private browsing modes, and VPNs struggle to completely block browser fingerprinting.

Unlike cookies, device fingerprinting doesn’t require a website to install files or extensions into your web browser. Instead, it uses server-side signals and JavaScript to collect harmless information about your device and settings, such as:

• Canvas fingerprinting: A simple JavaScript command forces your browser to draw a hidden 2D image. It then hashes the pixel data to obtain specific information about your graphics card, operating system, hardware drivers, and so on.

• WebGL Rendering: Instead of drawing images on a 2D canvas, this feature forces the browser to render 3D images in WebGL, revealing even more details about your GPU manufacturer and model.

• Font Enumeration: By displaying specific text strings and measuring the sizes of bounding boxes, the APIs display the entire font library installed on your system.

• AudioContext Tips: This feature processes a quiet audio signal using your audio hardware, creating a sound waveform unique to your device.

• Device specifications: Hardware specifications are considered readily available, and most fingerprinting APIs can easily retrieve them. Parameters such as screen resolution, memory size, battery level, number of processor cores, etc. can be combined to create a unique digital identifier.

Checking your browser fingerprint

If you’re curious about what data your browser may be transmitting to websites, Cover Your Tracks offers a free scan that will accurately reveal your vulnerability. You can also repeat this scan as many times as you like after customizing your privacy settings. The site instantly generates a report that shows whether cookies or trackers are enabled in your browser, as well as the types of data your device transmits and that fingerprint identification technology can access.

For example, a scan of my Chromium-based Arc Browser revealed that when accessing a website, 18.26 bits of identifying information were transmitted in HTTP headers, including my time zone, language preferences, font library, and privacy settings, as well as a unique fingerprint linked to my device via Canvas and WebGL rendering. And this occurred after I had already disabled cookies or trackers at the browser level.

How to Prevent Browser Fingerprinting in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and Other Browsers

It’s impossible to completely stop browser data collection, as this technology doesn’t use a single point of access to collect your data. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it harder for websites and trackers to access you. Let’s look at how each browser handles browsing data collection, with step-by-step instructions for setting up or manually enabling these features:

Safari

Apple introduced Enhanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection in Safari with the release of iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma. Since its initial release, this feature has been significantly expanded. In Safari 17 and later, you can enable this feature to enhance your privacy while browsing:

On iPhone and iPad

1. Go to Settings > Apps > Safari > Advanced .

2. Click Enhanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection .

3. Select all viewing options .

On macOS

1. Launch Safari. Then go to Safari > Preferences .

2. Go to the Advanced tab.

3. Make sure “Use enhanced tracking and fingerprinting protection” is enabled and select “Entire browsing” from the drop-down menu.

Edge

The Microsoft Edge browser provides fingerprint protection even with the lowest privacy settings, requiring no action from you. However, you can increase the level of protection by following these steps.

1. Launch Edge on your Windows PC, click the three dots in the top-right corner, and go to Settings > Privacy, search, and services .

2. Find the Tracking Prevention section and select the Strict option for the highest level of protection against fingerprinting and cryptomining.

3. You can also scroll down to the Exceptions section to whitelist trusted websites that require tracking to be enabled to function properly.

Firefox

Firefox bundles all of its privacy protection features into Enhanced Tracking Protection , which covers both fingerprinting and cookie use. Advanced users even have the privacy.resistFingerprinting flag available on a hidden settings page, but for most casual users, this is unnecessary and can disrupt the basic functionality of many modern websites.

For most internet users, enabling the following features should provide sufficient protection against most fingerprinting APIs:

1. In Firefox, go to Preferences > Privacy & Security .

2. Under Enhanced Tracking Protection, select Custom .

3. Make sure the boxes next to “Cookies” and “Fingerprinters” are checked. You should also set fingerprint blocking to “All Windows” to extend protection beyond incognito mode.

4. For even more protection, select “Strict” instead of “Custom” under “Enhanced Tracking Protection” to get the most effective privacy settings.

Brave

Even though Brave is based on Chromium, the developers have gone to great lengths to implement robust fingerprinting protection into the browser using the Shields component . This is one of the most effective fingerprinting prevention settings I’ve tested, and it’s very easy to enable.

1. To access Brave Shields, click the lion icon in the address bar of the Brave browser window. You can also access it by going to Settings > Shields .

2. Make sure the Tracker and Ad Blocking setting is set to Standard or higher.

3. Fingerprint protection is now enabled. Brave Shields effectively encrypts any data collected by the fingerprinting API, preventing trackers from obtaining any reliable information to create a profile of your browser.

Chromium

Now for the most important part: since Google shut down its Privacy Sandbox component in April 2025, Chrome doesn’t offer built-in fingerprint protection. However, there are several third-party extensions that can be used to add these features to your browser, albeit with some caveats.

• Canvas Blocker : When a website uses the HTML canvas element to create a unique fingerprint of your device, Canvas Blocker adds random noise to the data generated by the canvas element to confuse the fingerprinting API. It’s relatively lightweight compared to similar extensions because it doesn’t completely block the canvas element, but instead uses subtle modifications to confuse fingerprinting trackers.

• Fingerprint Spoofer : A much more comprehensive anti-fingerprinting extension, as it also blocks JavaScript and image-based fingerprinting, and can spoof user agent or navigator values. Furthermore, it completely replaces the canvas image generated by your browser, rather than making minor modifications to it, making canvas fingerprinting even more difficult.

• StealthHound : This premium anti-fingerprinting extension prevents websites from obtaining information about your hardware, blocks Canvas fingerprinting attempts, disables tracking scripts, and even generates a risk signal indicating how aggressively a website is attempting to identify you. StealthHound runs exclusively on your local device and doesn’t send information to any cloud apps or platforms, ensuring data sovereignty.

However, Chrome , in its latest version, Manifest V3, introduced certain restrictions that affect the usefulness of third-party services. It now actively prevents extensions from injecting code into a webpage before it’s fully loaded, which often gives fingerprinting technologies enough time to obtain the necessary data before the spoofing mechanisms are triggered. If fingerprint protection is truly important to you, Google Chrome isn’t the best option. If you need a Chromium-based browser with reliable fingerprint protection, consider Brave.

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