AliExpress accused of fingerprinting shoppers with silent audio trick that also muted a dev's headphones

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/24/aliexpress-accused-of-fingerprinting-shoppers-with-silent-audio-trick-that-also-muted-a-devs-headphones/5291662

187 points · 10 comments · view on lemmy.world

10 Comments

DarkCloud@lemmy.world · 39 pts · 17d (4 replies)

No way! The Chinese government?? Trying to track users??? They would never!

Every website from Facebook to Google has fingerprinted you my guy.

wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 17d (3 replies)

This appears to be a new tactic though

Zarobi@aussie.zone · 12 pts · 17d

He said the scripts built a WebAudio graph that introduced a sawtooth oscillator to generate a waveform, an analyzer to measure the result after the waveform passes through a browser’s audio implementation, and a script to read the associated frequency data.

This is a fairly interesting method of fingerprinting. Annoying too, as it hogs the audio channels as experienced by the discoverer

roofuskit@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 16d

It's actually an old one.

x00z@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 17d

Add it to the pool of a thousand others.

BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 17d (2 replies)

I've had mixed results with it but there's a few extensions that will send fake and generic data to any site that requests it. In some cases the webpage wouldn't load.

cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 17d (1 reply)

Unfortunately it can make you look like a bot and if they have a deluxe cloudflare subscription or something similar you might not get past the bot check.

zarathustrad@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 16d

If only a technology existed that could Solver the flare problem.

SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 17d

This is an old method of fingerprinting. Used to be common.

0x0@infosec.pub · 2 pts · 17d

Ill bet amazon and others are doing the same and similar

melfie@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 17d
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