See Exactly How Websites Track Your Browser Fingerprint
Ever get that creepy feeling an ad is following you around the internet? Or wonder how a site seems to "remember" your device even after you clear cookies? The answer is often browser fingerprinting. It's a tracking technique that doesn't rely on storing data on your machine. Instead, it stitches together a bunch of seemingly harmless details about your browser and system to create a unique identifier—your digital fingerprint.
Most of us know it exists, but it feels abstract. A new open-source tool called YourInfo makes it tangible. It's a simple, local web app that shows you, in real-time, exactly what data points your browser is giving away for free. Let's crack open the hood.
What It Does
YourInfo is a self-hosted dashboard that collects and displays the information your browser exposes to every website you visit. It queries a wide range of JavaScript APIs and properties to build a comprehensive profile of your browser environment. This isn't about guessing what might be tracked; it's about showing you what is being exposed right now.
Why It's Cool
The power of this tool is in its clarity and immediacy. It demystifies a complex privacy topic by making the data visible. You can see everything from the obvious (your user agent and screen resolution) to the more subtle and powerful fingerprinting vectors:
- Canvas Fingerprinting: It draws a hidden graphic and analyzes how your specific combination of hardware and graphics drivers renders it, creating a highly unique hash.
- WebGL & AudioContext: Similar to canvas, these probe your system's graphics and audio capabilities for identifiable quirks.
- Font Enumeration: It lists all the fonts installed on your system—a surprisingly distinctive dataset.
- Browser Plugins & MimeTypes: Shows which plugins (like PDF viewers) you have available.
- System Properties: Things like your platform, language, timezone, and hardware concurrency.
Seeing this data laid out on one page is a stark reminder of how unique our browser configurations really are. For developers, it's an invaluable educational tool and a great way to test the effectiveness of privacy-focused browser settings or extensions.
How to Try It
The best part? You can run this locally in under a minute. No data gets sent to any external server—it all runs in your browser.
- Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/siinghd/yourinfo.git - Navigate into the project folder and serve it. You can use any simple HTTP server. With Python ins