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The Panopticlick – You Are Being Tracked
Posted 28 Jan 10
Via Brian Krebs: it turns out that with all but the highest levels of browser security enabled, any website that wants to can uniquely identify your computer.
Cookies, history, visited sites, behavior — none of that matters. Simply assembling all the configuration information your browser shares is enough. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has assembled a demonstration here. Go ahead, try it!
Scary, huh? My own results depended on the browser. Using Opera, with Javascript and cookies disabled, isn’t bad. But of course that setup makes it difficult to actually read many websites, so my fallback is Firefox, with scripting enabled. And on that platform, my config is unique among all 140,000 sites the Panopticlick has tested so far.
The metaphor they’re using is “digital fingerprint,” but it’s more like a DNA sample.
They know who you are. And they’re watching.
Well, there’s always Tor. But that makes your online experience slow and crippled indeed. I use it anyway for certain research — you know, nuclear terrorism and so forth — but it’s not practical for day-to-day browsing.
Happy Data Privacy Day!
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Technology