AliExpress accused of fingerprinting shoppers with silent audio trick that also muted a dev's headphones

“Shortly after loading the AliExpress homepage, audio from my phone would stop playing.”

Alibaba only got caught because the tracking broke something a user could hear. A silent sawtooth oscillator at zero gain leaves no media element, so the browser’s mute control does nothing and nobody notices. Firefox buckets 99.24% of users into three CPU categories and Brave blocks the scripts outright. Chrome, the browser owned by an ad company, offers almost nothing.