Collected research

The Web Never Forgets: Persistent Tracking Mechanisms in the Wild

Gunes Acar, Christian Eubank, Steven Englehardt, Marc Juarez, Arvind Narayanan and Claudia Diaz · securehomes.esat.kuleuven.be

Instrumented-browser crawls of the top 100,000 sites give the first in-the-wild measurement of canvas fingerprinting, evercookie respawning and cookie syncing. Trackers draw hidden canvas text to derive a stable device fingerprint, restore deleted cookies from Flash, IndexedDB and other stores, and swap identifiers server to server, so clearing state does not stop tracking.

Record

Researcher

Gunes Acar, Christian Eubank, Steven Englehardt, Marc Juarez, Arvind Narayanan and Claudia Diaz

Published by

securehomes.esat.kuleuven.be

Format

Whitepaper

Topic

Other

In the archive

• Collected in the 2014 research round

Tags

• info-leak
• cookie
• javascript
• flash
• dom
• large-scale-scan
• measurement-study
• owasp-a07-2021

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Gunes Acar, Christian Eubank, Steven Englehardt, Marc Juarez, Arvind Narayanan and Claudia Diaz, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 9 August 2026.