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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Just how anonymous are you?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posted an interesting tool called Panopticlick that assesses how unique (and consequently trackable) you are online, based solely on your browser configuration. That is, even if you limit or disable cookies, your browser "leaks" information that (potentially) could be used to uniquely identify you.

In my case, the most revealing information came from my plug-in and font listing, which provided 18.22 and 19.22 bits [1] of information, respectively. Translated, my plug-in and system fonts were sufficient to uniquely identify me out of the ~610,000 browsers tested.

Unfortunately, the EFF points out that defending against such tracking is pretty difficult, since completely disabling JavaScript (which provides most of these data) tends to break the functionality of a large number of sites out there these days.

[1] Read the EFF's "A Primer on Information Theory and Privacy" if you're not sure what the term "bits" means.

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