Skip to content
IP Checker

Browser fingerprinting

What is canvas fingerprinting?

Canvas fingerprinting draws hidden text and shapes and hashes the pixels. Small differences in fonts, GPUs and drivers make the result distinctive.

Typography and geometry becoming a pixel field and then a compact canvas hash

Canvas fingerprinting compares the pixels produced by a fixed drawing operation across visits.

DRAW
fixed scene
READ
pixel output
COMPARE
hash

The technique

A script draws text, emoji, gradients and geometric shapes onto an invisible HTML canvas, reads the pixels back, and hashes them. Font rasterisation, anti-aliasing, emoji sets, GPU and driver differences all subtly change the output.

The resulting hash is stable for a given browser and system, and differs across many configurations.

How browsers defend

Some browsers block canvas readback, require permission, or add imperceptible random noise so the hash changes on every read. This site draws the canvas twice; if the two hashes differ, the browser is randomising canvas output and the value is reported as randomised rather than fingerprintable.