[keycloak-dev] Device fingerprinting

Stian Thorgersen sthorger at redhat.com
Wed Sep 19 13:18:01 EDT 2018


>From what I briefly read about fingerprinting and its legality it mentions
it's not that OK if used to track users, but that's not the case in this
situation I'd say, but hey I'm not a lawyer.

I wonder if we really do need anything beyond what the user agent string
gives us. Perhaps OS/Browser is sufficient?

On Tue, 18 Sep 2018 at 22:03, Douglas Palmer <dpalmer at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone
>
> I haven’t managed to find an open source solution to device fingerprinting
> which gives us everything we need. This library however gets us most of the
> way there http://valve.github.io/fingerprintjs2 <
> http://valve.github.io/fingerprintjs2>. It doesn’t give us enough
> information to distinguish between a desktop and a laptop but it will let
> us correlate devices and we can distinguish between a PC, a tablet and a
> phone. We can also get the OS, Browser and Versions from the user agent
> string.
>
> I have taken a look at a few sites the track device sessions. Apple can
> tell the difference between an iMac, a MacBook, an iPad and an iPhone.
> Facebook, GitHub, Google, LinkedIn and Pinterest don’t distinguish between
> an iMac and a MacBook. So maybe the library above is enough.
>
> I also came across the following article from the EFF which casts doubt on
> the legality of digital fingerprinting in Europe.
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/gdpr-and-browser-fingerprinting-how-it-changes-game-sneakiest-…
> <
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/gdpr-and-browser-fingerprinting-how-it-changes-game-sneakiest-web-trackers
> >
>
> Does anyone have any input on any of this? Is there a better library that
> I have missed? Should we stick to parsing the user agent to avoid potential
> problems with GDPR?
>
> Regards
> Doug
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