Online tracking for targeted advertisements is a controversial story actively changing by new laws. Some companies that rely on advertising on a huge scale, such as Google, insist on user tracking while evolving more ethically. That’s being said, some researchers are also looking for alternative solutions to keep tracking the users.
Bursts of benchmarks
A group of researchers from French, Israeli, and Australian universities is looking for using GPUs as fingerprints to ensure user tracking. The method, dubbed DrawnApart, currently relies on WebGL, the API used for 3D rendering in the browser. What DrawnApart does is basically a GPU benchmark to gather its metrics such as compute power, shader unit counts, etc.
It creates tasks of GLSL executions via WebGL, and WebGL assigns those tasks to non-randomized compute units. Then, the results are converted into a digital fingerprint. And all of those will be done while ensuring the target execution unit is completely dedicated to minimizing the effects that may create variances in the results.
According to the whitepaper published by the researchers, the results are still distinguishable even when the other hardware is changed in the system. That means the generated GPU fingerprint will remain the same until you change it.
Identical chips can perform differently
There are a lot of metrics that affect how a chip performs. Even two identical graphics cards or CPUs might perform differently. The remaining hardware and the software installed on the system will create a variance and ambient temperature, including the cooling solution. Even then, two chips in identical specs, ambiance temperature, and software might perform differently because of the varying quality of the silicon used for manufacturing the chips. DrawnApart works by making those little differences more clear by its algorithms.
There are also new more browser-GPU APIs coming, such as WebGPU, with more features that might ease DrawnApart’s job; they might also completely prevent. According to the researchers, DrawnApart’s accuracy is 98%, and it can do its measurement/benchmark in just 150 milliseconds, which is pretty impressive.
Is it you they track or the GPU?
Looking at the ethical side of this process, it is actually a very complicated story. Yes, DrawnApart will deliver a bunch of unavoidable information that you can only get rid of by buying a new graphics card. On the other hand, the object being tracked online is a GPU, not directly the person. The track data will be matched with the GPU itself. Either way of opinions, there is one fact: they will not stop trying to track us anytime soon.