We’re thrilled to announce our newest innovation, Smart Signals, a collection of signals that Fingerprint gathers to provide deeper insight into anonymous visitors. These new capabilities are available with our new pricing plan, Fingerprint Pro Plus, as well as the enhanced Fingerprint Enterprise plan. 

Smart Signals are used in conjunction with the visitor ID to offer real-time actionable insights which reveal the true intentions of every visitor — even if they’re anonymous. For example, when a browser has been tampered with or the time zone doesn’t match with the location of the browser. They enable data-driven insights that can be linked to specific fraud use cases for companies looking to bolster their fraud or risk engines to take a comprehensive approach to fighting fraud with high-quality identification data.

Smart Signals mark the start of an exciting new era for Fingerprint. They enable businesses to make smart, data-driven decisions based on real-time actionable intelligence to prevent increasingly sophisticated fraud while providing a positive experience for trusted users. Just in the last month alone, Fingerprint identified 4.3 million instances of bad bots, 14 million users visiting in incognito mode, and 21 million users browsing with a VPN. Read our full press release for more. 

Smart Signals will enable Fingerprint customers to make better, more intelligent decisions with additional pieces of metadata required to detect and prevent today’s fraudsters. Additionally, Smart Signals can be easily incorporated into existing fraud engines via a simple API call. 

What are Smart Signals?

Smart Signals are a collection of signals that have been enhanced by Fingerprint to provide specific information about the anonymous visitors on your website or mobile app. Unlike our visitor ID, these signals go beyond identification and will inform the Fingerprint user about specific traits and tools visitors are using to obfuscate their identity. 

Here is the complete list of Smart Signals and their capabilities: 

Browser bot detection

Browser bot detection identifies bot traffic in real time, with the ability to discern between a good bot, a bad bot, and a human user. It’s important to accurately identify all types of bots as some “friendly” bots are necessary to index content and could harm SEO scoring if preemptively blocked. 

Read more about how prevalent bots are and how to prevent them in our bot detection guide. 

Incognito mode detection

Incognito mode detection detects when a visitor is browsing in incognito mode. Users will oftentimes revisit a website in incognito mode in an effort to conceal their identity. However, with incognito mode detection, Fingerprint users will be able to identify this user as a returning user and not an entirely new one. 

IP geolocation

IP geolocation accurately determines the location of the actual IP address, preventing visitors that have hidden their location from going undetected. This is useful in situations where you’d like to prevent or avoid transactions and logins from flagged locations or countries, or personalize website and app experiences based on location. 

VPN detection

VPN (virtual private network) detection determines if the user is using a VPN and ensures their IP time zone matches their browser time zone. Visitors use VPNs when attempting to conceal their identity or give the impression they are located somewhere other than their current location to access location-restricted web content. 

VPN detection is an important signal that allows the Fingerprint user to match previous session time zones with the current one to identify if a user is browsing from a VPN in a different location than stated. 

Browser tamper detection

Browser tamper detection identifies incidents when a user has tampered with browser traits and uncovers suspicious browser signature anomalies like spoofing mobile device browsers or if the reported user agent isn’t consistent with other browser attributes.

IP blocklist matching 

IP blocklist matching allows the Fingerprint user to see when an IP address matches a known database of malicious actors and spammers so immediate action can be taken to block future visits. These blocklists are known IP addresses that were a part of known email spam and network attacks. 

Raw device attributes

Raw device attributes include 35 raw browser identification attributes to provide Fingerprint users with even more information than our standard visitor ID provides. This enables Fingerprint users to not have to run our open-source product in conjunction with Fingerprint Pro Plus and Enterprise to get those additional attributes. 

Rooted device detection

Rooted device detection ensures a safe Android mobile application environment by detecting rooted devices. This provides extra detail on whether Fingerprint users can trust an end user's device or not and adds an increased layer of security on operating systems that are more prone to fraud. 

Android emulator detection

Android emulator detection prevents spam and protects against nefarious Android emulator farms by ensuring the request is coming from a physical device. This Smart Signal, much like browser bot detection, can help identify instances of mobile automated traffic which are more prevalent on Android devices. 

Get your first look at Smart Signals

Try Smart Signals now

Fingerprint is also launching a new self-serve tier, Fingerprint Pro Plus, which includes Smart Signals. Fingerprint Pro Plus is geared for businesses that need additional tools to understand their anonymous users, identify malicious users, and thus prevent fraud. Pro Plus provides Fingerprint’s visitor ID, a unique identifier, and combines it with Smart Signals to tackle your fraud use cases. Fingerprint Pro Plus will offer five Smart Signals with the additional four Smart Signals available in Fingerprint Enterprise.  Try Smart Signals for free here! 

See Smart Signals in action

We will be hosting a webinar on June 27, 2023 at 1:30 p.m. ET to show Smart Signals in action and provide more context and information on Fingerprint’s device intelligence platform. To register for the webinar, click here. 

We are extremely excited for Fingerprint customers to start using Smart Signals as they represent our effort to provide engineering teams, product managers and fraud leaders with more data and intelligence to continue the fight against fraud.