What is fingerprinting?
Fingerprinting identifies your browser without storing any cookie, by combining technical details: screen size, installed fonts, time zone, hardware. Taken together, these settings form a nearly unique fingerprint, which tracks you from site to site even after you delete your cookies and history. The topic continues in chapter 2 of my book, Vivre sans Google.
Information verified on July 13, 2026
Delete all your cookies, open a private window: some sites still recognize you. How? Through fingerprinting. Your browser reveals dozens of technical details: screen size, installed fonts, time zone, graphics card, language. Each detail is ordinary. Their combination is nearly unique. A silhouette in the street, really: no need to read the badge to recognize you from afar.
That fingerprint tracks you from site to site without storing anything on your machine. This is the whole difference with third-party cookies: a cookie can be deleted, a fingerprint is recalculated on every visit. That is why “deleting your cookies” is no longer enough. The tracker doesn’t need to write anything on your device anymore, watching you is enough.
There is a way out, though. Some browsers scramble their fingerprint: they round off values, add slight random noise, block overly curious scripts. As a result, your profile changes from one visit to the next, and you become one visitor among many again. Does your current browser protect you on this front? That is one of the first questions to ask it.
Where it plays out: chapter 2 of the book helps you take back control of your browsing, the Web browsers category lists those that resist tracking, and the Brave versus Chrome comparison shows the difference in practice.
This topic is chapter 2 of my book
It answers these questions, among others:
- which settings actually make a difference once the browser is installed?
- how do you handle the work computer where Chrome is required?
- and how do Safari and Edge hold up, the ones nobody ever compares?
Forthcoming 22/10/2026 from Éditions Eyrolles
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Tech jargon, translated
Every week in The Spark, I break down one tech story through the privacy lens. And what you can do about it, concretely.
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