UnveiledChina
A developer using Bluetooth headphones accidentally caught Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba secretly hijacking his computer's audio system without making a single sound. When his wireless headphones refused to switch audio to his phone while browsing AliExpress, he inspected the site's hidden code. He discovered background scripts holding his computer's audio pipeline wide open. Alibaba was using the browser's WebAudio API to run invisible sound waves at zero volume. By measuring tiny hardware differences in how each computer processes those signals, the site created a unique digital fingerprint to track devices. Because the secret audio path stayed active, it froze his Bluetooth connection while quietly scraping hardware memory, screen dimensions, and network data in the background.
Brave
Alibaba's AliExpress was caught using users' audio systems to track them. AliExpress wasn't recording users but instead playing a silent sound and measuring how users' specific devices processed it in order to fingerprint them. But don't worry because Brave stops this.
