Share button may be sharing your browsing history, investigators discover

                 A new study by researchers at KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium) and Princeton University has revealed a secret method by which websites track users without their consent using a previously undetected cookie-like tracking mechanism embedded in 'share' buttons. About one in 18 of the world's top 1,00,000 websites are breaching users' privacy through this.
Using hidden codes, the mechanism gets important information about the user's browser type, graphics card, system fonts and even display properties, according to a statement by KU Leuven. Because this grouping of data is highly likely to be unique for each user, it can be reliably associated to individual users, like a fingerprint. This is called "canvas fingerprinting".
Once a website has determined a device's fingerprint, it can easily recognize the user on subsequent site visits, much in the same way cookies do. But while unwanted cookies can be flagged or blocked to enhance a user's online privacy, there is no available solution for doing so with fingerprints.Surprisingly, the researchers traced 95 per cent of canvas fingerprinting scripts back to a single company: It is the world's largest content sharing platform and provides free website plugins such as share buttons, follow buttons and content recommendation features. The company reaches an estimated 97.2% of Internet users in the United States and receives 103 billion page views each month.Can users protect themselves against canvas fingerprinting? Acar and his colleagues studied the effect of ad-industry opt-out tools offered by the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance. No websites included in the opt-lists stopped collecting canvas fingerprints after activating the opt-out option.
This is an advanced tracking mechanism that misuses browser features to enable the circumvention of users' tracking preferences. We hope that our results will lead to better defenses, increase accountability for companies deploying sticky tracking techniques and an invigorated and informed public and regulatory debate on increasingly resilient tracking techniques.

Be careful friends. :O

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