Every snapWONDERS analyse report now has a Fingerprinting section, and the Tracking section has been tightened up so it only shows what it says.
Tracking and fingerprinting are not the same thing
Tracking is a single value that points to one device or one file: a camera serial number, an owner name, or a unique ID written into the file. One value is enough to tie two files together.
Fingerprinting is different. It is made of details that many people share: the app and its version, the phone's firmware, the colour profile, the lens, the video encoder, the language setting. None of them names you. Put them together, though, and they form a pattern that can be surprisingly narrow.
Why it matters
Say you post photos and videos from the same phone, through the same apps, on different accounts. The serial numbers may be gone, but the pattern often is not. A platform, or anyone collecting your posts, can use that pattern to link them to one person. It is the same idea as browser fingerprinting, where a website recognises you from your browser's settings without needing a cookie.
What changed in the report
- A new Fingerprinting section lists these shared details, with a short explanation of what they are. Hover over or tap the info icon beside it for the quick version.
- Tracking now holds only unique values. Things that were there before but are shared by many devices, such as a colour profile ID, have moved to Fingerprinting.
- Video reports now pick up more of both: unique IDs written by video tools and platforms are listed under Tracking, and audio settings, codec profiles and encoder details under Fingerprinting.
- Dates that are not when the photo was taken, such as when the file was edited, exported or when its colour profile was made, now sit under Other dates rather than being mixed in with the capture time.
See it in a report
Here is one of our own photos, taken on a Samsung Galaxy A56: a library forecourt on a spring morning.
Before, the phone's firmware build and its colour profile were listed as camera and device information, alongside the make and model:
Now, device information holds just the make and model:
The rest has its own Fingerprinting section. None of these rows identifies the phone's owner, but read together, the firmware build, the colour profile, the time-zone offset and the image size describe this exact phone model on this exact software release, set to this time zone:
The info icon beside it explains what fingerprinting is, and how it differs from tracking:
Dates that are not the capture time now have their own place under Other dates. In this photo, that is when Samsung built the colour profile, back in 2022, which clearly is not when the photo was taken:
Fingerprinting shows on the report so you know it is there, but it barely moves the grade, because no single shared detail identifies you on its own. Tracking still counts as a real privacy issue.
Check and remove yours
Our guide How to remove a photo's fingerprint walks through checking a photo, stripping its fingerprint with Strip Metadata in Convert, and what's left afterwards. We tested it on the photo above: 25 fingerprinting details went down to one.
