Protecting Users' Identity Against Browser Fingerprinting

Nowadays, customer data represents a potential goldmine. Regarding the users' online activity, sophisticated and obscure user-tracking mechanisms of high accuracy have arisen like Browser Fingerprinting, which collects attributes of users' devices to generate a unique identifier token. This threatens the users' privacy. Although modern browsers allow blocking JavaScript to prevent this type of tracking, it also affects the overall users' experience (as websites typically do not work properly without JavaScript). To tackle this issue, we propose a browser extension to anonymize a user's browser information by performing an API normalization against passive and JavaScript-based fingerprinting. This extension masks the actual system values before sending them to the requested website. This causes that the users' token also changes, becomes more challenging for advertisers to track users. Our experimental results are promising, as they have shown that the plugin provides appropriate anonymity to users by making their identity less unique.