alt Hacker NewsI feel like there are two levels of fingerprinting here, and a lot of the confusion is downstream of not properly distinguishing them:
There's the kind that tries to find out what browser vendor, OS, and sometimes hardware you use, and the kind that tries to identify you across visits, unrelated origins etc.
I agree that the former is probably inherently impossible to avoid to a large extent, but the latter is both a bigger privacy issue and at least in theory possible to prevent.
I've only encountered the latter described as fingerprinting. Which makes sense side, like fingerprints, the information is being used to uniquely identify an individual.
The former is traditional analytics and is not enough to uniquely identify an individual.
Not all analytics are as privacy invasive as fingerprinting.