This Chrome Extension Blocks Fingerprinting Without Breaking Websites

What Is Browser Fingerprinting

Every time you visit a website, your browser hands over dozens of technical details about your device. Screen resolution. Installed fonts. Graphics card model. Timezone. Language settings. Operating system version. Even how your device renders invisible test images.

Individually, these data points seem harmless. Combined, they create a unique fingerprint that identifies you across the web with 99% accuracy or higher.

Unlike cookies, you cannot delete a fingerprint. It is calculated on the fly every time you visit a site. Unlike IP addresses, it does not change when you use a VPN. Unlike tracking scripts, it works even in private browsing mode.

Why Privacy Tools Fail

The tools most people rely on for privacy do not protect against fingerprinting:

• Incognito mode resets cookies but does not alter your canvas fingerprint, TLS signature, or any other hardware based identifier.
• VPNs only hide your IP address. They do not change the dozens of other data points that form your fingerprint.
• Cookie blockers are irrelevant because fingerprinting does not use cookies.
• Ad blockers may block some tracking scripts but cannot prevent the browser from responding to fingerprinting requests.

As cookies become less reliable due to privacy regulations and browser restrictions, fingerprinting is becoming more common, not less. Advertisers and data brokers are increasingly turning to this technique precisely because users cannot easily opt out.

A New Approach: Fingerprint Spoofer

A Chrome extension called Fingerprint Spoofer takes a different approach to the fingerprinting problem. Instead of blocking the fingerprinting scripts entirely, which often breaks websites, it randomizes the data your browser reports.

The extension offers three primary spoofing modes:

• Navigator spoofing: Randomizes the JavaScript navigator object, which contains information about your user agent, language settings, hardware, plugins, and extensions.
• Canvas spoofing: Adds a dynamically generated fake canvas image for each website, blocking one of the most effective fingerprinting techniques.
• User agent spoofing: Replaces your user agent string with randomized data including browser type, screen dimensions, and plugin information.

The key advantage is usability. Unlike more aggressive anti fingerprinting tools that often break websites, Fingerprint Spoofer is designed to maintain compatibility with normal web browsing.

What It Does and Does Not Do

The extension does not eliminate your fingerprint. It randomizes it. Testing shows the most significant improvement in WebGL fingerprinting, where uniqueness dropped from 1 in 634 browsers to 1 in 2.7.

However, only one spoofing feature works at a time, and some fingerprinting vectors remain unaddressed. Overall identifying data showed limited improvement in testing.

For users who need stronger protection, specialized browsers remain the better option:

• Tor Browser provides the strongest protection by making all users look identical, at the cost of speed and usability.
• Brave randomizes certain fingerprintable values each session.
• Firefox offers Enhanced Tracking Protection that blocks known fingerprinting scripts.
• Mullvad Browser makes all users appear identical to websites, defeating fingerprinting without Tor's speed penalty.

The Fingerprinting Arms Race

Browser fingerprinting represents a fundamental tension in web privacy. The same APIs that enable rich web applications also expose enough information to uniquely identify users.

Under GDPR, fingerprinting for tracking technically requires consent. In practice, enforcement has been limited, and there is no federal law in the United States specifically addressing the technique.

For now, the most effective protection comes from either making yourself look like everyone else through browsers like Tor or Mullvad, or constantly changing your fingerprint so trackers cannot build a consistent profile. Tools like Fingerprint Spoofer offer a middle ground for Chrome users who want some protection without switching browsers entirely.

You can test your own browser's fingerprint uniqueness at the EFF's Cover Your Tracks site or AmIUnique.org.