Most browser "fingerprinting" methods have a pretty short half-life. The last assessment I read said something like half of the fingerprints were lost within 24 hours.
There are some companies that advertise device fingerprinting for moderation/anti-abuse services, but I have yet to see it in any martech stack. I assume they give lots of false positives and don't distinguish between different users/devices on the same network.
>Most browser "fingerprinting" methods have a pretty short half-life. The last assessment I read said something like half of the fingerprints were lost within 24 hours.
That's absolutely not my experience. Maybe if you use some weird research-level fingerprinting technique, but most fingerprints are just regular old boring stuff - screen and browser viewport size, installed plugins and fonts, browser UA and settings, hardware/gpu quirks, etc[1]. And it doesn't have to be 100% reliable, just reliable enough to track your activity to show you some ads.
[1] as a privacy conscious individual I'm fully aware just viewport size is enough to almost uniquely fingerprint me. I use my laptop screen, with sidebery extension, browser tab bar hidden by user css and sway in tabbed mode. My second computer is less unique, I "just" use sway and firefox with the minimal tab size (that for some reason is hidden must be unlocked in the about:config so it's very rarely used).
The problem is, if you are running a marketing database of millions and and millions of distinct IDs, you have to get into very esoteric fingerprint factors. Anytime you have a driver update or switch devices, you lose the connection in the data.
Doesn't the firefox resistfingerprinting setting fuzz most of these things? I see a lot of misconceptions about it on here when people use amiunique. It will say you are unique but if you look for a historical match there aren't any because you are unique, but also different each time you show up.
This gets lost a lot - just because you can prove uniqueness doesn't mean it's persistent or repeatable. Some of the "uniqueness" factors include things like number of audio devices or battery life.
There are some companies that advertise device fingerprinting for moderation/anti-abuse services, but I have yet to see it in any martech stack. I assume they give lots of false positives and don't distinguish between different users/devices on the same network.