The odd and almost unreadable proportions of the TeamViewer font make it well-suited for fingerprinting. If it does, then the website knows you’ve got that font installed on your computer - and by extension the software that installed it. It then changes the font to, say the TeamViewer font, and checks to see if the text changes width.
A webpage creates a hidden bit of text and measures how wide it is. Font detection relies on brute-force testing. Websites can detect the fonts you’ve installed on your computer. You get the TeamViewer font as an option in all programs that support setting your own font (such as Microsoft Word). However, these fonts are all meant to enhance your use of the software by giving you more fonts options. It’s not uncommon for creative software - like Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, and the Adobe Creative Suite - to install complementary fonts. The included characters feature a rather unique and mostly unreadable design. The remaining 24 majuscules (uppercase) characters of the Latin alphabet are encoded as an apostrophe.
It contains the characters to write TeamViewer plus the digits 7 and 8.
You can see an almost complete type specimen of the TeamViewer font in the above illustration. Intentional or not, it enables websites to detect if you have TeamViewer installed on your computer. So, here’s a bit of a mystery: Why does TeamViewer – the popular remote desktop program – install a font it doesn’t use on your computer? The abstract font (shown in the above image) doesn’t seem to serve any purpose in the software.
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