> Canvas Fingerprinting. They draw an image in the background using vector graphic commands. Afterwards they save the image to a rasterized PNG. This data is quite unique among different devices depending on settings and hardware. > They also use audio fingerprinting to identify visitors. This doesn’t mean they actually use your microphone or speaker. Instead they generate a sound internally and record the bitstream,…
The problem is that it used to be good enough to block "known-bad" IPs but now with AWS and cloud services it's very easy for cybercriminals to get around IP blocks.
For normal users, tracking can be done with cookies, so fingerprinting isn't really needed for normal users anyways (not entirely true if you're a totally bad actor, which is why browsers have been trying to block some of the more common ways to fingerprint).
But for a script that spawns a thousand AWS instances to sign up 1000 bot accounts that can then be used to sell likes for example, it's pretty easy to tell that it's a script instance because all of them will behave in almost exactly the same way (processor performance, installed plugins, reported screen size, etc. etc.).
An "alternative" to using fingerprints would be to use captchas instead, but bots have gotten much much better at solving captchas. So in fact, ReCaptcha will also use a number of fingerprinting techniques, which is why in many cases you can just click the check box instead of solving a captcha.