Kind of a smart move by this company: write up an AI analysis of all fingerprinting techniques in hopes they get fixed after outrage so their scraping company can make more money. If it weren't for companies like this, fingerprinting wouldn't be so ubiquitous and the internet would be a better place in general.

I prefer articles like this coming from the other side of the battle (fingerprint.js and friends) because at least their motives are clear.

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codedokode 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I disagree, fingerprinting is necessary to track humans and it will be used regardless of scrapers being there or not.

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coldbrewed an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I work at a CDN that provides bot detection services. I agree that there's baseline necessity in terms of fraud detection, and if not necessity then definitely financial motivation to fingerprint. But these days, abusive scraping is far and way the the main driver for fingerprinting.

We don't fingerprint for ad purposes, and we destroy PII for humans as fast as we can because PII should be treated as radioactive. But we see customers that are constantly burned by abusive scrapers and the scrapers aren't slowing down.

The current approach to scraping is strip mining the Internet and is having the corresponding pollution effects that you'd expect. I'm fine with individuals doing whatever weird automation they want, more power to you, but it's this industrial scale crawling and extraction that's degrading the Internet from all angles.

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nradov 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Why is it necessary to track humans? It might be more profitable for advertising but that's not the same as necessary.

	▲	zdragnar a minute ago \| parent [-]
		Tracking humans isn't necessary. Fingerprinting is necessary to tracking humans.