  Device fingerprinting is a widely used technique that allows a third party to
identify a particular device. Applications of device fingerprinting include
authentication, attacker identification, or software license binding. Device
fingerprinting is also used on the web as a method for identifying users.
Unfortunately, one of its most widespread uses is to identify users visiting
different websites and thus build their browsing history. This constitutes a
specific type of web tracking that poses a threat to users' privacy. While many
anti-tracking solutions have been proposed, all of them block or tamper with
device fingerprinting techniques rather than just blocking their web tracking
application. Therefore, users may be limited in their experience while using a
website. In this paper, we propose Privacy-preserving Client-side
Fingerprinting (PCF), a new method that allows device fingerprinting on the
web, while blocks the possibility of performing web tracking. To this end, PCF
is built upon fingerprinting transparency: any website ought to declare its
fingerprinting scripts while users will compute them in a privacy-preserving
manner, limiting the resultant fingerprints for each different domain and,
therefore, making web tracking not feasible.
