Inaudible Sounds Used to Fingerprint Browsers Catch AliExpress Red-Handed
Matt Callaghan said hidden WebAudio scripts muted his Bluetooth headphones and could fingerprint users, while Firefox said its protections block the technique for 99.24% of users.
- Researcher Matthew Callaghan discovered Chinese retailer AliExpress tracking visitors via WebAudio fingerprinting after his Bluetooth headphones stopped playing audio while visiting the site; closing the tab restored connectivity.
- Further digging revealed two "extremely obfuscated" scripts within Alibaba's browser security tooling that built a WebAudio graph to process inaudible sounds while setting audio gain to zero.
- Callaghan reproduced the issue on Chrome and Firefox, though Firefox issued a statement claiming its anti-fingerprinting technology effectively thwarts the tracking method.
- Brave blocks the specific scripts used by AliExpress by default, while Safari employs Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection to prevent WebAudio-based tracking by injecting audio errors.
- For 99.24 percent of users, fingerprinting categorizes hardware into three "buckets" defined by CPU types including those with or without Fused Multiply-Add instructions; the script failed for 48 users.
11 Articles
11 Articles
Inaudible sounds used to fingerprint browsers catch AliExpress red-handed
Chinese retailer AliExpress has been caught fingerprinting visitors after one of the metrics—an outdated technique that measures inaudible sounds it sends to browsers—impeded a researcher's ability to use his bluetooth headphones. Researcher Matthew Callaghan said he stumbled on the stealthy tracking by mistake. After loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from his phone stopped playing over his multipoint headphones, which accept connections fr…
AliExpress accused of fingerprinting shoppers with silent audio trick that also muted a dev's headphones
Developer Matt Callaghan claims he caught Alibaba trying to track web users by playing sounds through browsers vulnerable to audio fingerprinting. The software engineer drew attention to the issue late last week after investigating why his Bluetooth headphones stopped playing music whenever he visited Alibaba's website. “Recently I ran into a strange problem with my Bluetooth headphones,” Callaghan wrote. “They support multipoint Bluetooth audio…
AliExpress is accused of tracking its visitors with a sound they don't hear. On the homepage of the Chinese online sales giant, two scripts play an inaudible signal to identify each computer. The technique was spotted this summer by a developer, then confirmed by the Brave browser.
AliExpress Is Supposed to Track Users Secretly via Audio Fingerprinting - You Can Do that Against It
A developer at AliExpress, a low-cost retailer, has discovered how the website is secretly twitching you, even though you reject the cookies. If you buy from AliExpress, you should know a browser extension. This article has been sorted under Current Fraud Warnings.
A free tool displays live everything your browser tells about you. The verdict is brutal: an ordinary Chrome session can be unique among 7.6 billion.
The Chinese e-commerce giant secretly exploits an invisible audio tracker to identify its visitors without any classic tracer. This silent mechanism generates an inaudible sound in the background, analyzing how the device treats it to design a unique fingerprint. A stealthy surveillance method that has been exposed in a purely fortuitous manner following a hardware conflict with wireless headphones.
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