Browser fingerprinting at website, why?

When i entered the eelo (now /e/) website a request for extract the HTML5 canvas was detected by Firefox Features

image
And also a request to extract the image canvas data from javascript.

I can understand why the website is trying to extract the fingerprinting “.dom rect” or the “screen data”,
This can be used for adjust the user interface, but, I’m not understanding why a company
that promises privacy are practicing/trying to unique identify a user with the canvas data,
My question is: Why browser fingerprinting is used for at main page?

If this is a stupid question, sorry, but i want to know the answer, is this for ads, moderation?,
I’ll be waiting for an answer, thanks

Regards, -Bayron.

Hi,
From what I know, we do not maintain any user information on the website.
You can raise an issue with the details here. I can ask someone from the website team to have a look and provide an explanation as to why this is happening.

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Okay, thank you, but, only to keep the question alive in the forum, i want to say;
you treat this like an issue when this is obviously intended to be so, why you would want to uniquely identify an user to after delete that id (Pretending “You” are a website), it makes no sense, there are others methods to identify a user temporarily which are obviously safer (Like cookies)

I think/suppose that this fingerprinting is not intended, but only an issue.

For two reasons:

  1. this is not a big tech, and managing all that information require people. As far as I can see they are all fighting to improve the system and to remove many bugs.

  2. issues like this has been raised in the past by users and then solved.
    See That's embarrassing: Google as search engine on this forum! - #3 by nottolino

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As mentioned above, you will need to raise an issue on Gitlab and share exact details for the team to simulate this. The team members were not able to see any warnings on chromium or Firefox even with all plugins disabled. Therefore, you need to raise a ticket, and we can have the team look into it and resolve it.

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