Customers are the most important aspect of every successful business or organization. The truth is that no business will manage to stay afloat if it doesn’t have customers. You can have the most advanced product on the market, but if you don’t have customers interested in that product, you will never become a successful business. In order to provide the best possible service to your customers, you need to know who your customers are and what they want. This is why most of the businesses and organizations that have an online presence use browser fingerprinting to track the behaviour of their users on their website. Have you ever wondered how browser fingerprinting works and how it can help your company? Now it is your time to find out.
Why use Browser fingerprinting?
When you have a brick-and-mortar store you can interact with your customers, see any issue that arises, create personal connections and learn about their interest in your business, or even notice any suspicious behaviour. This makes it easier to create a clear picture about your customers, adjust to their needs and keep your business competitive in the market.
But that is not possible with the ecommerce website. That is one of the biggest differences between online and offline retailers. With the ecommerce business, you can’t really interact with customers in the same way as your access to them is limited. By not using tracking tools, it is impossible to understand customer behaviour or to recognize suspicious activity. With the device fingerprinting you can create a clearer picture about your customer and make informed decisions. This sophisticated tool can be used for various purposes. Most commonly it is being used for marketing as it can help with targeted advertising, but it is irreplaceable in cyber security. It has become an indispensable part of the marketing and security plans of many different companies. For example, Amazon uses it to suggest other products you may want to buy, Google so they can give you more accurate suggestions when you are using their search and Coinbase uses it to protect their users from cyber threats.
What exactly is browser fingerprinting?
Browser fingerprinting is a tool for online tracking that uses details of a user browser to create a unique fingerprint for that user. It collects more than hundreds of variables from your browser like the type of your device and its operating system, browser version, language and time settings, sensors such as accelerator, proximity and gyroscope and much more. These details collected might not look a lot when you look at them separately, but when put together they create a user’s unique browser fingerprint. Think about it like this. When trying to describe someone you want to find in the crowd you can just say their gender or their name or even their hair color but that won’t make it easier to find them. But if you try to describe them by using their name, gender, their hair colour, the clothes they were wearing and even the colour of the nail polish finding that person will become incredibly easier. While there might be the other person in the crowd that has the same hair color or even their name, but the other variables will be different. Browser fingerprint is the same, it can have some similarities with different users but ultimately combinations of all the variables makes it unique.
How to use Browser fingerprinting for cyber security purposes?
There are many different benefits the browser fingerprinting can bring to the company when used for cybersecurity purposes. The most important aspect is that it can be used to prevent fraud before it even happens. Since it creates a unique fingerprint for each user, it can recognize when one or more variables change and allow businesses to react on time. The next step depends on the cybersecurity plan of each business, but most often browser fingerprinting is used with a multi-factor verification tool which means the system will prompt users to enter additional verification methods to confirm they are legitimate users. This combination is usually used by banks or other financial institutions. They use browser fingerprinting to confirm the identity of the user with addition of their login details and if there is any change, they will activate an additional level of verification which can either be calling the account holder or sending them a one-time password.
Truth is that with a growing threat from cyber attacks, more businesses should start rethinking their cybersecurity plan and become more proactive. By using the right tools, educating their employees and customers they can significantly reduce the chance of the attack happening to them.
