What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web ?

How Unique – How track-able, is your browser

Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their
web browser.  Unfortunately, this is not the whole story.

When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer’s
configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used
to identify you and your computer.
Some companies are already using technology to try to identify individual computers.
But how effective would this kind of online tracking be?

EFF is running an experiment to find out.

http://panopticlick.eff.org/resources/images/panopticlick-logo.gif

Panopticlick will anonymously log the configuration and version information from your operating system,
your browser, and your plug-ins, and compare it to our database of many other Internet users’ configurations.
Then, it will give you a uniqueness score — letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the
web.

Adding your information to our database will help EFF evaluate the capabilities of Internet tracking and
advertising companies, who are in the business of finding as many ways as possible to record your online
activities. They develop these methods in secret, and don’t always tell the world what they’ve found.
But this experiment should give us more insight into the future of online tracking, and what web users
can do to protect themselves.

I just ran the test on myself, and my browser is unique amongst the 1,231,863 browsers tested so far.

It’s my browser plugin details, no one else has the exact configuration I do.

My list of system fonts is almost unique and my privacy is in danger again…like always… 🙂


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