
Audio Fingerprinting - Sami_Lehtinen
http://themerkle.com/audio-fingerprinting-may-become-the-new-norm-to-breach-browsing-privacy/
======
muzakthings
This is somewhat of a misnomer.

For those of you who came here expecting _acoustic_ fingerprinting, realize
this is a different class of algorithms related to locality sensitive hashing
(LSH), ala Shazam, etc.

If you look at the page
[here]([https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/](https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/)),
you'll see they are merely looking at the audio processing capabilities for
your browser's, which is tied to your hardware microphone's / browser
version's specs. Things like number of channels, FFT size, etc.

In summary, this is only invasive so far as knowing your laptop model or
browser version, not actual recorded voice (you have to call `getUserMedia()`
for that IIRC).

For more information on acoustic fingerprinting, see
[here]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint))
and [here]([http://willdrevo.com/fingerprinting-and-audio-recognition-
wi...](http://willdrevo.com/fingerprinting-and-audio-recognition-with-
python/)).

~~~
StavrosK
So "audio capability fingerprinting", which isn't anywhere near as frightening
and clickbaity.

------
Zikes
The original study:
[http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site...](http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site_tracking_measurement.pdf)

The relevant section of the study is "6.4 AudioContext Fingerprinting", on
page 15. Notably, they link to an online tool they developed that demonstrates
this fingerprinting technique [1]

[1]
[https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/](https://audiofingerprint.openwpm.com/)

------
ungzd
Article is just recompilation of articles from other news sites, there is no
explanation how it works and there is link to "acoustic fingerprint" article
on Wikipedia which is about entirely different thing.

~~~
hammock
Submission be revised to original source: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/think-
youre-not-being-tracked-n...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/think-youre-not-
being-tracked-now-websites-turn-to-audio-fingerprinting-to-follow-you/)

~~~
dang
The original source was posted and discussed extensively at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438).

------
cyphar
I'm interested to see how long it takes the Tor Browser Bundle to get a fix
for this attack.

