taken.: See Everything Your Browser Tells Websites About You
taken. is Vol. IV of the Since You Arrived series by Matt at Rise Up Labs. It reads your browser’s fingerprint in real time and shows you the results. Your location, GPU model, screen resolution, operating system, fonts, battery level, language, timezone, browser version. The page pulls these from standard JavaScript APIs in the milliseconds after you land.
None of it is stored. It computes everything in your browser, shows it to you, and forgets you when you close the tab. Every site you visit gets this data. This one is honest about it.
What Your Browser Gives Away
The page runs about twenty passive checks. Your IP goes to ip-api.com for a coarse location lookup, returning a city and ISP name. No storage, no logs. Everything else happens on your machine. The checks cover screen dimensions, color depth, CPU cores, GPU vendor and renderer, installed fonts (measured through text width rendering, a technique the EFF documented in 2010), battery percentage, language, timezone, browser vendor, and operating system.
It also computes a sixteen-bar fingerprint barcode from all these signals. Same combination produces the same barcode. The calculation stays local. Nothing is transmitted.
What It Chose Not to Run
The page documents the techniques it opted out of. Canvas fingerprinting, which Princeton researchers found on 5% of the top 100,000 websites in 2014. Clipboard reading, which any page can trigger after a click. Login detection via favicon URL probing, which works by loading icons from known services and watching which requests succeed. These are documented, legal, and widely deployed. This page simply doesn’t use them. Most pages you visit today probably will.
Why This Sticks
Browser fingerprinting is tracking without cookies. The EFF’s Cover Your Tracks project has been demonstrating for years that most browsers are unique enough to identify across sessions with zero stored state. The fonts on your machine alone provide one of the strongest signals. Every site you load builds this profile in the moment you arrive.
Most of them also fire hundreds of additional beacons to advertisers, fingerprinters, session-replay tools, and tag managers. This page sends two anonymous events and tells you about both. The gap between those two numbers is the entire point of the project.
Links
- taken. — The page itself
- Since You Arrived — The series homepage
- Cover Your Tracks (EFF) — Check how unique your browser is
- Canvas fingerprinting study (Princeton) — The 2014 paper that documented the technique in the wild
- The Leaking Battery (Olejnik et al.) — 2015 paper showing battery API can track users across sites
- @sinceyouarrived.world — The project on Bluesky
Crepi il lupo! 🐺