emctech

Good to know! I have added a note and link to my post.

Perhaps accessing the microphone is something else they do, however that is not the issue in my case nor what my article is about.

While it may not be effective at fingerprinting, the side effect of the attempt sure is annoying when it stops my music! Do you know if it would count as a bug if muting the firefox tab or the browser as a whole does not stop the audio stream?

I doubt the FBI will be flying to china to knock down any doors! You aren't wrong though, and countries which enforce GDPR I would expect to make noise if this was happening to their constituents.

Thanks for your input and perspective! Do you think it is a bug that the muting of the firefox tab doesn't stop the audio stream? It is frustrating that companies would use such an annoying tactic to track their users with it also ineffective.

I touched on this in my article, once the data has been collected and sent to their servers you have no idea what they do with the information. At least with GDPR it is supposed to be regulated but obviously that is not the case everywhere and websites can still lie.

ebay does this i think, someone else linked a post about port scanning

I am glad people like the write up and it is fostering a conversation! It is such a happenstance that i looked into this.

Thanks for the feedback :D

It doesn't actually stream an audio file, the scripts generate audio at runtime using a sawtooth oscillator. It also only happens after several seconds.

Someone else mentioned that cloudflare uses the webaudio for verification challenge, but only triggers it briefly.

I wonder if it is something firefox and chrome devs need to look at because if it is accessing the audio device surely it should be notified to the user.

It just annoyed me so much that it was interrupting my music!

Does it hold an audio stream open constantly or just briefly during the challenge? On AE it never stops