Canvas Fingerprinting Instead of Cookies
Julia Angwin (via John Gordon):
The type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor’s web browser to draw a hidden image, and was first documented in a upcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it.
"assign each user’s device a number that uniquely identifies it" seems to be rather an exaggeration of canvas fingerprinting's capabilities.