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 installed, it's as easy as:
cd yourinfo python3 -m http.server 8000 - Open your browser and head to
http://localhost:8000.
That's it. The page will load and instantly populate with all the fingerprinting data it can gather from your current browser session. Refresh the page to see if any values change or remain consistent.
Final Thoughts
YourInfo isn't a privacy tool to block tracking; it's a transparency tool to understand it. As a developer, I find projects like this incredibly useful. It helps build a concrete understanding of the mechanisms behind abstract concepts, which is the first step toward building more privacy-aware applications or advocating for better user protections.
Running it yourself is a quick, eye-opening experiment. Try it in different browsers (Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Brave), with privacy modes enabled, or with extensions like uBlock Origin or CanvasBlocker, and watch the fingerprint data change. It turns a nebulous privacy concern into something you can see, test, and learn from.
Check out the project on GitHub to see the code or contribute.
@githubprojects
Repository: https://github.com/siinghd/yourinfo