Understanding the Limitations of Mobile Device Fingerprinting and How to Overcome Them

While mobile device fingerprinting presents a powerful fraud prevention tool offering dominance over traditional methods, it’s crucial to be aware of its limitations. Some key challenges include privacy concerns, potential inaccuracies, impacts on user anonymity, legal and ethical considerations, susceptibility to evasion, and hardware compatibility issues. We will be discussing these in detail below.

Understanding and addressing these limitations is crucial for digital platform owners looking to enhance their security measures effectively. Selecting the right fraud prevention provider that offers robust fingerprinting technology can help mitigate these challenges.

Let’s dive into the six most significant limitations of mobile device fingerprinting.

5 Limitations of Mobile Device Fingerprinting

1. User Privacy Concerns:

Collecting user information to create a fingerprint can be perceived as invasive. Unlike cookies, users cannot easily clear their fingerprints, making them feel monitored and potentially driving them away from the platform. This represents a significant limitation for digital platforms relying on mobile device fingerprinting.

2. Potential Inaccuracy of Fingerprints:

Device fingerprints can change over time with software updates such as browser version updates and OS updates, or hardware component changes such as graphics cards and USB devices, or other factors. These sudden changes to the user’s hardware and software can affect the uniqueness of fingerprints while reducing consistency. This can lead to false positives/negatives in fraud detection and personalization efforts.

A use case for such limitations includes online banking applications that use mobile device fingerprinting to detect unusual login activity. If a user updates their operating system or replaces their computer’s graphics card, the application's fraud detection system might interpret these changes as suspicious, flagging the legitimate user’s login as potentially fraudulent.

3. Compliance with Legal and Ethical Standards:

For any device fingerprinting solution to work ethically & effectively, obtaining data collection consent, and ensuring full compliance with the data protection laws are essential. These laws are continually evolving, which often makes it challenging for organizations to keep their practices perfectly aligned at all times. This may raise ethical and legal questions in the minds of users for potential misuse of collected data, which adds up to one of the limitations.

There are only a handful of mobile device fingerprinting solutions like SHIELD that work under full compliance with GDPR and other data protection regulations. SHIELD’s approach is designed to ensure transparency and build trust with the users, demonstrating commitment to safeguarding their information. SHIELD has been recognized by leading industry authorities, including the Global InfoSec Awards from Cyber Defense Magazine and the Cybersecurity Excellence Awards from Cybersecurity Insiders, further validating trustworthiness and expertise.

4. Susceptibility to Evasion Techniques:

A big limitation of mobile device fingerprinting is when users deliberately attempt to evade it using fraud software. These frequent attempts can directly affect the accuracy of results, leading to more false positives (or negatives) and resulting in less effective fraud detection.

Such an example is the use of privacy-enhancing tools, like VPNs or browser extensions, that can interfere with the collection or accuracy of device fingerprints. It’s advisable to use a fraud detection system that can detect the availability of such fraud software on users’ devices and keep regular tabs on such devices.

5. Incompatibility With User’s Hardware & Software:

Though device fingerprinting is typically compatible with most modern devices and widely used browsers, it may still fall short on less common or outdated systems. Device fingerprinting may not work effectively on all devices or browsers and can potentially exclude certain users from services or features.

As an example, we can assume a streaming platform that uses device fingerprinting to authenticate users. Suppose a genuine user tries to log in with an old device or a less common browser. In that case, it’s possible the user, despite being a legitimate subscriber, is denied access to a certain or overall content.

How can platform owners overcome mobile device fingerprinting limitations?

The answer is very simple: Choosing the right fraud prevention solution. With one correct decision you can overcome most of the mobile device fingerprinting limitations but you must consider a few points before deciding on it. The right fraud prevention must:

• Balance effective fraud prevention with user privacy and provide transparent consent processes.
• Handle changes in hardware and software to minimize inaccuracies and maintain reliability.
• Be fully compliant with evolving data protection laws and ethical standards to avoid legal issues.
• Detect and adapt to evasion techniques like VPNs to maintain accuracy in fraud detection.
• Be compatible with a wide range of devices and browsers to prevent excluding legitimate users.

Privacy-focused fraud prevention solutions like SHIELD are best poised to help you tackle fraud without compromising user privacy and experience. SHIELD’s device-first risk AI platform focuses on tackling fraud at the root - the device - without requiring personally identifiable information (PII). Coupled with the latest AI & ML technology, SHIELD uniquely identifies devices across app and web platforms even when fraudsters employ advanced techniques to evade detection.

To see how the SHIELD solution can help you navigate these limitations and optimize your fraud prevention strategy, schedule a demo session with us today.