Browser Fingerprinting on a Windows PC (Chrome)

Browser Fingerprinting on a Windows PC (Chrome)

Google's Privacy Sandbox initiative was discontinued in April 2025 without ever shipping a fingerprinting-specific mitigation.¹ That leaves Chrome on this Windows PC with no engine-level equivalent to Safari's Advanced Fingerprinting Protection or Firefox's resistFingerprinting mode, just a menu of individually configured privacy settings. CapyToolkit's own Windows 11 guide already documents the exclusive font set, the ANGLE-prefixed WebGL renderer string, and the DPI scaling ratio this configuration exposes; what that guide doesn't cover is that nothing in Chrome, by default, stands between those signals and a script reading them.

Specifications

Why nothing here suppresses the signals the Windows 11 guide already documents

CapyToolkit's own Windows 11 guide walks through the exclusive font set, the ANGLE-prefixed WebGL renderer string, and the non-integer DPI scaling values this kind of configuration exposes in detail. What that guide doesn't need to cover separately is the reason those signals reach a script unmodified in the first place: Chrome on this PC has no built-in mechanism that suppresses or randomizes any of them by default, unlike the browsers this same tool profiles on Apple hardware.

Google's Privacy Sandbox ended without a fingerprinting fix

Privacy Sandbox was discontinued in April 2025 without shipping a single fingerprinting-specific mitigation, leaving Chrome without one central anti-fingerprinting switch of the kind Firefox or Safari offer.¹ In its place, Chrome offers a scattered menu of individually configured settings, cookie controls, and Client Hints options, none of which suppress canvas, WebGL, or font enumeration output the way an engine-level protection would.

Client Hints exist, but a site has to opt in to receiving less

User-Agent Client Hints were designed so the default request header stays generic while a site actively requests more detail through an Accept-CH response header if it wants it.² Nothing about that design forces a site toward the reduced path; a site that wants the fuller picture simply asks for it. That stands opposite to Advanced Fingerprinting Protection, which this tool's iPhone and MacBook guides describe as applying automatically at the engine level regardless of what any individual site requests.

Why this combination reads as the least anonymous of the four devices in this set

Stacking the pieces together explains why a Windows Chrome scan tends to land at the higher end of the entropy scale among the devices this tool profiles. iPhone and MacBook Safari both apply engine-level fingerprinting protections that touch canvas, WebGL, and audio output; Samsung's Galaxy Chrome at least ships behind a somewhat-reduced default User-Agent header even though the underlying hardware APIs still expose real values. This Windows PC has neither an engine-level protection nor a meaningfully reduced default header standing between the fonts, GPU renderer string, and DPI ratio already documented in the Windows 11 guide and a script reading them.

No default noise means canvas, WebGL, and font rows repeat the same value every run

Run this scan on this PC twice in a row and the canvas hash, the WebGL renderer string, and the detected font list will read identically both times, because nothing in stock Chrome injects session noise the way Safari's Advanced Fingerprinting Protection or Firefox's resistFingerprinting mode does.² That exact repeatability, the same value on the tenth visit as on the first, is precisely the property that makes a signal useful for cross-session tracking in the first place, which is why the entropy score tends to sit higher here than on the Safari-based devices in this set.

Switching to Brave with Shields enabled, or to Firefox with resistFingerprinting turned on, would change that picture measurably on this same physical machine, since both apply engine-level randomization Chrome does not ship by default.³⁴ Running this scan before and after making that switch is the most direct way to see the difference on your own PC rather than taking the comparison on faith; the unchanged canvas hash, ANGLE renderer string, and font list it reports are exactly the stable hardware signals a tracking script keys a cross-session identity on.⁵