I don't know the research definition, but fingerprinting is a technique to uniquely track a user across multiple sites without a tracking beacon.
The most basic form of fingerprinting is to use the browser-supplied headers (user agent, version, OS). Canvas fingerprinting works because identical browser versions across different machines may render slightly different, but consistent. IIUC, canvas fingerprinting doesn't rely on any pixels shown to the user or anything unique to the site, but if the same canvas is rendered exactly the same on two different sites, that's another indication that both visits were from the same user.
I don't think the AudioContext fingerprinting uses the actual microphone: it uses the browser's (and possibly OS's) audio engine to generate an audio stream, then fingerprints the resulting data stream.
I don't know the research definition, but fingerprinting is a technique to uniquely track a user across multiple sites without a tracking beacon.
The most basic form of fingerprinting is to use the browser-supplied headers (user agent, version, OS). Canvas fingerprinting works because identical browser versions across different machines may render slightly different, but consistent. IIUC, canvas fingerprinting doesn't rely on any pixels shown to the user or anything unique to the site, but if the same canvas is rendered exactly the same on two different sites, that's another indication that both visits were from the same user.
I don't think the AudioContext fingerprinting uses the actual microphone: it uses the browser's (and possibly OS's) audio engine to generate an audio stream, then fingerprints the resulting data stream.