AliExpress accused of fingerprinting shoppers with silent audio trick that also muted a dev's headphones
Developer Matt Callaghan claims he caught Alibaba trying to track web users by playing sounds through browsers vulnerable to audio fingerprinting.
The software engineer drew attention to the issue late last week after investigating why his Bluetooth headphones stopped playing music whenever he visited Alibaba’s website.
“Recently I ran into a strange problem with my Bluetooth headphones,” Callaghan wrote. “They support multipoint Bluetooth audio, so they can be connected to my PC and phone at the same time. Normally, the PC takes priority playing audio, with my phone being able to play audio when nothing is playing on the PC.
“Usually I listen to music on my phone but with notifications or YouTube playing through the PC, this works reliably until I open an AliExpress page in Firefox or Chrome.
“Shortly after loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from my phone would stop playing. Closing the AliExpress tab fixes it...
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